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Vanishing Roads

And Other Essays

Br
Richard Le Gallienne

Mft-

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York London

trbe fmicftetbocftet ptese

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;

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
Second Impression

tTbe Knfclterbocfecr ptttt, llUm fietl

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TO
ROBERT HOBART DAVIS

DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught
sight of each oilier and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing
Road of the world, quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control
my tendency to Mver at their number from the fact that we have
travelled them, always within hailing distance of each other , I with
the comfortable knowledge thai near by I had so good a comrade, so
true a friend.

For this once, by your leave, we wonH "can" the sentiment, — to
use an idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,—^
but I, at least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by
way of dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your
quick-firing mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible.
You were one of the first to make me welcome to a country of which,
even as a boy, I used prophetically to dream as my ** promised land,'*
little knowing that it was indeed to be my home, the home of my
spit it, as well as tlie final resting-place of my household gods; and,
having you so early for my friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon
came to regard the American humourist as the noblest wofk of God ?

There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to
travel together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to
vanish over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each
other, — so that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail
together on the next route, whatever it is going to be.
Always yours,

Richard Le Gallienne,

Rowayton, December 25, IQ14.

330.395

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' '%r:'

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For their discernment in giving the following essays
their first opportunity with the reader the writer
desires to thank the editors of The North American
Review, Harper's Magazine^ The Century, The Smart
Set, Munsey's, The Out-Door World, and The Forum.

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CONTENTS

I-

II.

III.-

IV.-

V.-

VI.

VII.

VIII

-Vanishing Roads

Woman as a Supernatural Being

-The Lack of Imagination Among
Millionaires .

— ^The Passing of Mrs. Grundy

— Modern Aids to Romance

The Last Call .

— The Persecxttions of Beauty

— The Many Faces — ^the One
Dream ....

-The Snows of Yester-Year
-The Psychology of Gossip

XI. — The Passing Away of the Editor 131
XII
XIII
XIV

XV,

-The Spirit of the Open .
:. — An Old American Tow-Path
'. — ^A Modern Saint Francis .

'. — The Little Ghost in the Gar.
DEN ....

vii

PACK
I

55
68

94
102

136
143
157

170

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viii Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

XVI. — The English Countryside . 184

XVII. — London — Changing and Un-
changing . . . .198

XVIII. — The Haunted Restaurant . 206

XIX. — The New Pyramus and Thisbe 220

XX. — Two Wonderful Old Ladies . 228

XXI. — A Christmas Meditation . . 242

XXII. — On Re-Reading Walter Pater 257

XXIII. — The Mystery of '* Fiona Mac-
Leod'* 275

XXIV. — Forbes-Robertson: An Appreci-
ation 291

XXV. — ^A Memory of Fr^d^ric Mis-
tral 306

XXVI. — Imperishable Fiction . . 320

XXVII. — The Man Behind the Pen . 340

XXVIII. — Bulls in China-Shops . . 358

XXIX. — The Bible and the Butter-
fly 369

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Vanishing Roads

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Vanishing Roads

VANISHING ROADS

THOUGH actually the work of man's hands —
or, more properly speaking, the work of his
travelling feet, — roads have long since come to
seem so much a part of Nature that we have
grown to think of them as a feature of the land-
scape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature
has adopted them among her own works, and the
road that motmts the hill to meet the sky-line, or
winds away into mystery through the woodland,
seems to be veritably her own highway leading
us to the stars, luring us to her secret places.
And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how
or why, have come to have for us a strange spirit-
ual suggestiveness, so the vanishing road has
gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the
avenue of mortal wayfaring, the link of communi-
cation between village and village and city and

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2 VanisKin^ Roads

city; anc^ome roads indeed seem so lonely, and
so beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels
they were meant to be travelled only by the soul.^
All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is
a more mystical destination, some bourne of
which no traveller knows the name, some city,
they all seem to hint, even more eternal.

Never more than when we tread some far-
spreading solitude and mark the road stretching
on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it
in some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage
of lofty storm-stirred trees, or as it merely loiters
in sunny indolence through leafy copses and ferny
hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moon-
light or at morning; never more than thus, eagerly
afoot or idly contemplative, are we impressed by
that something that Nature seems to have to tell
us, that something of solemn, lovely import be-
hind her visible face. If we could follow that
vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should
we find that meaning there.? Should we know
why it stops at no mere market-town, nor comes
to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last
to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose
of all our travel? Meanwhile the road beckons us
on and on, and we walk we know not why or
whither.

Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts,
not merely by way of similitude, but just in the
same way that everything in Nature similarly
stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as

•: ; •. • • ! t

- »• • ••

• •• • •

• • -• •
, • • • • •

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VanisKin^ Roads 3

moonlit waters stir them, or the rising of the sun.
As I have said, they have come to seem a part of
natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as
suggestive a starting-point as any other for those
speculations which Nature is all the time provoking
in us as to why she affects us thus and thus.
These mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled
confusedly against the sky — so much granite and
iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to
the soul, strangely something besides, so much
more. These rolling shapes of cloud, so fantasti-
cally massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic
change like painted music in the heaven, radiant
with ineffable glories or monstrous with incon-
ceivable doom. This sea of silver, ** hushed and
halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as
Judgment Day. So much vapour and simshine
and wind and water, says one.

Yet to the soul how much more!

And why? Answer me that if you can. There,
truly, we set our feet on the vanishing road.

Whatever reality, much or little, the personi-
fications of Greek Nature-worship had for the
ancient world, there is no doubt that for a certain
modem temperament, more frequently met with
every day, those personifications are becoming
increasingly significant, and one might almost say
veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the
first instance, have been responsible for the parti-
cular forms they took, their names and stories,
yet even so they but clothed with legend presences

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4 VanisKin^ Roads

of wood and water, of earth and sea and sky,
which man dimly felt to have a real existence;
and these presences, forgotten or banished for a
while in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic re-
pression, are once more being felt as spiritual
realities by a world coming more and more to
evoke its divinities by individual meditation on,
and responsiveness to, the mysterious so-called
natural influences by which it feels itself sur-
rounded. Thus the first religion of the world
seems likely to be its last. In other words, the
modem tendency, with spiritually sensitive folk,
is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all
theologies, Nature herself, and, prostrating our-
selves before her mystery, strive to interpret it
according to our individual ''intimations," listen-
ing, attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making,
to use the phrase of one of the profoundest of
modern Nature-seers, oiu* own "reading of earth." ,
Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, ^as some
one has said, ''we are all Wordsworthians to-
day." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth
passionately wished himself suckled, is not "out-
worn." He himself, in his own austere way, has,
more than any one man, verified it for us, so that
indeed we do once more nowadays

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathM horn.

Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted
away for good. All over the world they are troop-

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VanisKih^ Roads 5

ing back to the wocxis, and whoso has eyes may
catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of
the nymph in the brake." Imagery, of course;
but imagery that is coming to have a profotmder
meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than
it ever had for Greece and Rome. All myths that
are something more than fancies gain rather than
lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions
of htiman experience. The mysteries of Eleusis
would mean more for a modem man than for an
ancient Greek, and in our modem groves of Dodona
the voice of the god has meanings for us stranger
than ever reached his ears. Maybe the meanings
have a purport less definite, but they have at least
the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But
surely the Greeks were right, and we do but follow
them as we listen to the murmur of the wind in
the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near pre-
sence of the divine.

The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of
birds across the sky, and augiu* this or that of
their strange ways. We too still watch them in a
like mood, and, though we do not interpret them
with a like exactitude, we are very sure that they
mean something important to our souls, as they
speed along their vanishing roads.

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6 VanisKin^ Roads

This modem feeling of ours is quite different
from the outworn ''pathetic fallacy," which was
a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of
course, long since ceased to think of Nature as
the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine
that she has any concern with the temporal affairs
of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her
terrible moods with prayer and sacrifice. We
know that she is not thinking of us, but we do
know that for all her moods there is in us an an-
swering thrill of correspondence, which is not
merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the very
essence of our beings. It is not that we are read-
ing our thoughts into her. Rather we feel that
we are receiving her thoughts into ourselves, and
that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some
avenue simpler and profounder than reason, made
aware of certitudes we cannot formulate, but
which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond
the reach of common doubt — a faith, indeed, im-
elaborate, a faith, one might say, of one tenet:
belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and,
therefore, of our own being as a part thereof.

In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucid-
ity of conviction, that those forces which thus give
us that mystical assurance are all the time motilding
us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their
influence, and that we are literally and not fanci-
fully what winds and waters make us; that the
poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally
first somewhere in the tmiverse, and thence trans-

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VanisKin^ Roads 7

mitted to him by processes no less natural than
those which produced his bodily frame, gave him
form and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair.

It is not man that has ** poetized" the world,
it is the world that has made a poet out of man,
by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in the
same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it
with perfiune, or shaped a nightingale and filled it
with song. One has often heard it said that man
has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that
the pathos or grandeur of the evening sky, for
instance, are the illusions of his humanizing fancy,
and have no real existence. The exact contrary
is probably the truth — that man has no feelings of
his own that were not Nature's first, and that all
that stirs in him at such spectacles is but a trans-
lation into his own being of cosmic emotions which
he shares in varying degrees with all created things.
Into man's strange heart Nature has distilled her
essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in
colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the
nerve-centres of cosmic experience. In the process
of the stms he has become a veritable microcosm
of the universe. It was not man that placed
that tenderness in the evening sky. It has been
the evening skies of millions of years that have at
length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It
has passed into him as that '* beauty bom of
murmuring sound" passed into the face of Words-
worth's maiden.

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the

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8 VanisKin^ Roads

life of Nature is one with the life of man, how un-
important, or indeed merely seeming, the difference
between them. Who can set a seed in the groimd,
and watch it put up a green shoot, and blossom
and fructify and wither and pass, without reflecting,
not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into
existence, run his course, and is going out of exist-
ence again, by precisely the same process? With
so serious a correspondence between their vital
experience, the fact of one being a tree and the
other a man seems of comparatively small import-
ance. The life process has but used different
material for its expression. And as man and
Nature are so like in such primal conditions, is it
not to be supposed that they are alike too in other
and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it
thus clearly appears that man is as much a natural
growth as an apple-tree, alike dependent on sun
and rain, may not, or rather must not, the thoughts
that come to him strangely out of earth and sky,
the sap-like stirrings of his spirit, the sudden
inner music that streams through him before the
beauty of the world, be no less authentically the
working of Nature within him than his more obvi-
ously physical processes, and, say, a belief in God
be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as
apple-blossom of the apple?

If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a
truth, our contemplation of her beauty and marvel
is seen to be a method of illtimination, and her
varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-

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VanisKinit Roads 9

writing, a revelation through the eye to the soul
of the stupendous purport of the universe. The
stui and the moon are the torches by which we
study its splendid pages, turning diumally for our
perusal, and in star and flower alike dwells the
lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but
can only come indescribably to know by loving
the picttires. ''The meaning of all things that
are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in
the simset, or flits by us in the twilight moth,
thunders or moans or whispers in the sea, unveils
its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself in moun-
tain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in soli-
tary places, dreams in still waters, nods and
beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs its great
green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass.

As the pictures in this strange and lovely book
are infinite, so endlessly varied are the ways in
which they impress us. In our highest moments
they seem to be definitely, almost consciously,
sacerdotal, as though the sjnmbolic acts of a solemn
cosmic ritual, in which the universe is revealed
visibly at worship. Were man to make a prac-
tice of rising at dawn and contemplating in silence
and alone the rising of the sun, he would need
no other religion. The rest of the day would be
hallowed for him by that morning memory and
his actions would partake of the largeness and
chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again,
seems to be the very holiness of Nature, welling
out ecstatically from fountains of ineffable purity

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lo VanisKin^ Roads

and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights we
feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we
should pass them on our knees, as in some chapel
of the Grail. To attempt to realize in thought
the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to
wonder that we so seldom pay heed to such inner
promptings. So much we lose of the best kind
of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth;
and some day it will be too late to get up and see
the stmrise, or to follow the white feet of the moon
as she treads her vanishing road of silver across
the sea. This involuntary conscience that re-
proaches us with such laxity in our Nature- worship
witnesses how instintive that worship is, and how
much we unconsciously depend on Nature for otu-
impulses and our moods.

Another definitely religious operation of Nature
within us is expressed in that immense gratitude
which throws open the gates of the spirit as we
contemplate some example of her loveliness or
grandeur. Who that has stood by some still lake
and watched a stretch of water-lilies opening in
the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space
a profound thankfulness to ''whatever gods there
be" that he has been allowed to gaze on so fair a
sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our
lives, we feel in such moments our great good
fortune at having been bom into a world that
contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in
life, whatever our minor failures, to have beheld
such beauty; and mankind at large witnesses to

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VanisKin^ Roads ii

this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to
scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite.
Though the American traveller does not so express
it, his sentiment toward such natural spectacles
as the Grand Canon or Niagara Falls is that of an
intense reverence. Such places are veritable holy
places, and man's heart instinctively acknowledges
them as sacred. His repugnance to any violation
of them by materialistic interests is precisely the
same feeling as the horror with which Christen-
dom regarded the Turkish violation of the Holy
Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather
than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized
as having its shrines and oracles not only in Jeru-
salem, or in St. Peter's, but wherever Nature has
erected her altars on the hills or wafted her incense
through the woodlands.

After all, are not all religions but the theological
symbolization of nattu-al phenomena; and the
sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all the
churches have their counterparts in the mysterious
processes and manifestations of Nature? and is
the contemplation of the resturection of Adonis
or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to
meditate the strange return of the spring which
their legends but ecclesiastically celebrate? He
who has watched and waited at the white grave of
winter, and hears at last the first faint singing
among the boughs, or the first strange '* peeping"
of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like
return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from

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12 VanisKim^ Roads

one knows not where — the first butterfly suddenly
fluttering helplessly on the window-pane, or the
first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a
dazed, bewildered way; or comes upon the violet
in the woods, shining at the door of its wintry
sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and
all the magic processional of the months, as they
march with pomp and pathos along their vanishing
roads, will come to the end of the year with a lofty,
illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn
religious service, and a realization that, in no
mere fancy of the poets, but in very deed, "day
unto day uttereth speech and night unto night
sheweth knowledge."

Apart from this generally religious influence of
Nature, she seems at times in certain of her aspects
and moods specifically to illustrate or externalize
states of the human soul. Sometimes in still,
moonlit nights, standing, as it were, on the brink
of the universe, we seem to be like one standing
on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own
soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we
be, the whole solemn and majestic spectacle seems
to be an extension of our own reverie, and we to
enfold it all in some strange way within our own
infinitesimal consciousness. So a self-conscious
dewdrop might feel that it enfolded the morning
sky, and such probably is the meaning of the
Buddhist seer when he declares that ''the universe
grows I."

Such are some of the more august impressions

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V^nlsKin^ Roads 13

made upon us by the pictures in the cosmic picture-
book; but there are also times and places when
Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than
dramatic in its suggestiveness, as though she were
a stage-setting for some portentous human happen-
ing past or to come — the fall of kings or the tragic
clash of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a
great personal deed has room." Some landscapes
seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In
some places not marked by monuments, or other-
wise definitely connected with history, we have a
curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events
once enacted in this quiet grassy solitude — pre-
historic battles or terrible sacrifices. About others
hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending disaster,
as though weighted with a gathering doom.
Sometimes we seem conscious of sinister presences,
as though veritably in the abode of evil spirits.
The place seems somehow not quite friendly to
humanity, not quite good to linger in, lest its
genius should cast its perilous shadow over the
heeirt. On the other hand, some places breathe
an ineffable sense of blessedness, of imearthly
promise. We feel as though some hushed and
happy secret were about to be whispered to us out
of the air, some wonderful piece of good fortune
on the edge of happening. Some hand seems to
beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious
paradises of inconceivable green freshness and
supematurally beautiful flowers, fairy fastnesses
of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In

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14 VanisKin^ Roads

such hours the Well at the World's End seems no
mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the
forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent
fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely
there in yonder vale hidden among the violet hills.
Various as are these impressions, it is strange
and worth thinking on that the dominant sugges-
tion of Nature through all her changes, whether
her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or
jubilant, is one of presage and promise. She seems
to be ever holding out to us an immortal invitation
to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She
seems to say that what she brings us is but an
earnest of what she holds for us out there along
the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed,
she will not promise us, and no promise, we feel,
she cannot keep. Even in her tragic and bodeful
seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stem winters,
there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that
elevates and inspires, and in the darkest hours
hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify,
but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake
and eclipse she seems to be less busy with destruc-
tion than with renewed creation. She is but
wrecking the old, that

/ ... there shall be

I Beautiful things made new, for the surprise

Of the sky-children.

As I have thus mused along with the reader,
a reader I hope not too imaginary, the manner in.

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VanisKin^ Roads 15

which the phrase with which I began has rectirred
to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has
it been a mere literary device. It seemed to wait
for one at every turn of one's theme, inevitably
presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we
set our foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre
of vanishing roads, radiating in every direction
into space and time. Nature is forever arriv-
ing and forever departing, forever approaching,
forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there
seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her
partings a promise of meetings farther along the
road. She would seem to say not so much Ave
atque vale, as Vale atque ave. In all this rhythmic
drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing
on and on into Infinity, we feel less the sense of
loss than of a musical progression of which we too
are notes.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song
in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers
and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the
winds and the streams, the vanishing road of
beloved faces. But in this great company of
vanishing things there is a reassuring comrade-
ship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-
moving army, the vanguard of which is in Eternity.
The road still stretches ahead of us. For a little
while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle
of marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like
cotiriers bound for the front, shall still find us on
the road, and shower on us in passing their blos-

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1 6 VanisKing Roads

soms and their snows. For a while the munnur of
the running stream of Time shall be our fellow-
wayfarer — till, at last, up there against the sky-
line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know
for ourselves where the road wends as it goes to
meet the stars. And others will stand as we to-
day and watch us reach the top of the ridge and
disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to
turn that radiant corner and vanish with the rest
along the vanishing road.

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WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING

THE boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with
a sort of religious awe, as in his earliest love
aflEair he awakens to the delicious mystery we call
woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made
out of moonlight and water lilies, of elfin music
and thrilling fragrance, of divine whiteness and
softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being
of unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of
hair; such, too, through life, and through the ages,
however confused or overlaid by use and wont, is
man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before
the apparition woman.

Though she may work at his side, the comrade
of his sublimary occupations, he never, deep down,
thinks of her as quite real. Though his wife, she
remains an apparition, a being of another element,
an Undine. She is never quite credible, never
quite loses that first nimbus of the supernatural.

This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all
men, though, of course, all men may not be con-
scious of its truth, or realize the truth in just this
way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional

a 17

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1 8 Woman as a Supernatural Bein|(

sensitiveness of feeling and expression, say the
wonderful thing in the wonderful way, bring to it
words more nearly adequate than others can
bring; but it is an error to suppose that any beauty
of expression can exaggerate, can indeed more
than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is
all that poets have said of her, and all that poets
can never say:

Always incredible hath seemed the rose,
And inconceivable the nightingale —

and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate
voice of man's love since the beginning, a love
which is as mysterious as she herself is a mystery.
However some may try to analyse man's love
for woman, to explain it, or explain it away, be-
little it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains
an tmaccountable phenomenon, a ''mystery we
make darker with a name." Biology, cynically
pointing at certain of its processes, makes the
miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise.
Musical instruments are no explanation of music.
"Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale
souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in
Much Ado About Nothing, commenting on Baltha-
zar's music. But they do, for all that, though no
one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To
cry "sex" and to talk of nature's mad preoccupa-
tion with the species throws no light on the matter,
and robs it of no whit of its magic. |^The rainbow
remains a rainbow, for all the sciences.1 And

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Woman as a SupernaUiral Bein|( 19

woman, with or without the suffrage, stenographer
or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made
flesh and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the
meaning and message of beauty may be, such is
the meaning of woman on the earth — her meaning,
at all events, for men. That is, she is the embodi-
ment, more than any other creature, of that divine
something, whatever it may be, behind matter,
that spiritual element out of which all proceeds,
and which mysteriously gives its solemn, lovely
and tragic significance to our mortal day.

If you tell some women this of themselves, they
will smile at you. Men are such children. They
are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they are
fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a
dash of henna — and you are an angel. Some
women seem really to think this; for, naturally,
they know nothing of their own mystery, and
imagine that it resides in a few feminine tricks,
the superficial cleverness with which some of
them know how to make the most of the strange
something about them which they tmderstand
even less than men understand it.

Other women indeed resent man's religious
attitude toward them as sentimental, old-fashioned.
They prefer to be regarded merely as fellow-men.
To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence,
and to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair,
instead of the magnificent brains beneath it, is to
insult them. Yet when, in that old court of law,
Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for

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20 'Woman as a Sxipernatxiral Bein^

the defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer
than will ever be made by law examinations and
bachelor's degrees; and even when women become
judges of the Supreme Court, a development
easily within sight, they will still retain the greater
importance of being merely women. Yes, and one
can easily imagine some future woman President
of the United States, for all the acknowledged
brilliancy of her administration, being esteemed
even more for her superb figure.

It is no use. Woman, if she would, ''cannot
shake off the god." She must make up her mind,
whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to
her inalienable distinction of being woman ; nothing
she can do will change man's eternal attitude
toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and
to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as
strange and as lovely as the moon, the goddess
and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful
destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of
human beings, all that a man can be, to be so much
else as well; to be, so to say, the president of a
railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries;
a stenographer at so many dollars a week and
yet a nymph of the forest pools — ^woman, "and
yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth
endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis,
to change at will like the maidens in the legend into
wild white swans, or like^yrinx, fleeing from the
too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or
like Lamia, into a jewelled serpent ^

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Woman as a Supernatural Beinf^ 21

Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
And full of silver moons.

Modem conditions are still more favourable
than antique story for the exhibition of this
protean quality of woman, providing her with
opportimities of still more startling contrasts of
transformation. Will it not be a wonderful sight
in that near future to watch that woman judge of
the Supreme Cotu-t, in the midst of some learned
tangle of inter-state argument, turn aside for a
moment, in response to a plaintive cry, and, un-
fastening her bodice, give the little clamourer
the silver solace it demands! What a hxish will
fall upon the assembled court! To think of such
a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain,
working in harmony — ^with such a bosom! So
august a pillar of the law, yet so divine a mother.

As it is, how piquant the contrast between
woman inside and outside her office hours! As
you take her out to dinner, and watch her there
seated before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy
dazzling vision, an evening star swathed in gauzy
convolutions of silk and lace — can it be the same
creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with
notebook and pencil at your desk side, and took
down your specification for fireproofing that new
steel-constructed btiilding on Broadway? You,
except for yotu- evening clothes, are not changed ;
but she — well, your clients couldn't possibly
recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you

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22 Woman as a Supernatural Bein|(

are on the other side of the moon, ''side unseen**
of office boy or of subway throng; you are in the
presence of those ''silent silver lights and darks
undreamed of** by the gross members of your
board of directors. By day — ^but ah! at evening
under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of
the palm-shaded orchestra! Man is incapable of
these exquisite transformations. By day a gruff
and hurried machine — at evening, at best, a rapt
and laconic poker player. A change with no
suggestion of the miraculous.

Do not let us for a moment imagine that because
man is ceasing to remove his hat at her entrance
into crowded elevators, or because he hustles her
or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded
car3, that he is tending to forget this supematural-
ism of woman. Such change in his manners
merely means his respect for her disguise, her
disguise as a business woman. By day she desires
to be regarded as just that, and she resents as im-
timely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and
her marvel during business hours. Man*s appar-
ent impoliteness, therefore, is actually a delicate
modern form of chivalry. But of course his real
feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her
be in any danger or real discomfort, or let any
language be uttered unseemly for her ears, and
we know what promptly happens. Barring such
accidents, man tacitly understands that her
incognito is to be respected — till the charming
moment comes when she chooses to put it

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'Woman as a Supernatxiral Bein|( 23

aside and take at his hands her immemorial
tribute.

So, you see, she is able to go about the rough
ways, taking part even in the rough work of the
worid, literally bearing what the fairy tales call a
charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no
small advantage in the human conflict. So pro-
tected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take
the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Con-
sider her recent campaign for suffrage, for example.
Does any one suppose that, had she been anything
but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from
clubs and bullets, that she would have been al-
lowed to carry matters with such high victorious
hand as in England — and more power to her! —
she has of late been doing. Let men attempt such
tactics, and their shrift is tmcomplimentarily
short. It may be said that woman enjoys this
immimity with children and curates, but, even so,
it may be held that these latter participate in
a less degree in that divine nature with which
woman is so completely armoured.

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

exclaims Shakespeare.

But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its
*' action is no stronger than a flower," the power
wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore
by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as
undeniable as it is irresistible. ** Terrible as an

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24 Woman as a Supernatural Bein^

army with banners" was no mere figure of love-
sick speech. It is as plain a truth as the pro-
perties of radium, and belongs to the same order
of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are particu-
larly welcome as demonstrating the power of the
finer, as contrasted with the more brutally obvious,
manifestations of force; for they thus illustrate
the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose
operations we can plainly see, without being able
to account for them. A foolish phrase has it that
"a woman's strength is in her helplessness."
''Helplessness'* is a curious term to use for a
mysteriously concentrated or super-refined form
of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a
flower." But is the action of a flower any less
strong because it is not the action of a fist.*^ As a
motive force a flower may be, and indeed has time
and again been, stronger than a thousand fists.
And what then shall we say of the action of that
flower of flowers that is woman — that flower that
not only once or twice in history has

. . . launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium.

Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the con-
trary, woman is the best equipped fighting machine
that ever went to battle. And she is this, not
from any sufferance on the part of man, not from
any consideration on his part toward her "weak-
ness, " but merely because he cannot help himself,
because nature has so made her.

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Woman as a Supernatural Being 25

No simple reasoning will account for her influ-
ence over man. It is not an influence he allows.
It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is an
influence which he cannot explain, though he may-
make believe to do so. That ''protection," for
example, which he extends to her from the common
physical perils with which he is more muscularly
constituted to cope — ^why is it extended? Merely
out of pity to a weaker being than himself? Does
other weakness always command his pity? We
know that it does not. No, this "protection" is
but a part of an instinctive reverence, for which
Ke can give no reason, the same kind of reverence
which he has always given to divine beings, to
any manifestation or vessel of the mysteriously
sacred something in human life. He respects and
protects woman from the same instinct which
makes him shrink from profaning an altar or
robbing a chtu-ch, or sends him on his knees before
any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and
women are often classed together, but not because
the priests are regarded as effeminately "helpless" ;
rather because both are recognized as ministers
of sacred mysteries, both belong to the spiritual
sphere, and have commerce with the occult holiness
of things. Also be it remarked that this "protec-
tion" is chiefly needed against the brutality and
bestiality of man's own heart, which woman and
religion alike rather hold in subjection by their
mysterious influence than have to thank for any
favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman

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26 'Woman as a SxipemaUiral Bein^

because he first worships her, because, if she has
for him not always the beauty of holiness, she at
least always suggests the holiness of beauty.

Now when has man ever suggested holiness to
the most adoring woman? I do not refer to the
professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics,
but to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic
purity, of spiritual exquisiteness, which breathes
from a beautiful woman and makes the touch of
her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments
a thrilling mystery. How impossible it is to
imagine a woman writing the Vita Nuava, or a girl
feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and
worship as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first
sight of the girl Beatrice.

At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that
the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the
secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble
so violently that the least pulse of my body shook
therewith; and in trembling it said these words:
** Ecce deus jortior me, qui veniens dominabitur tnihi.
(Here is a deity stronger than I, who, coming, shall
rule over me.)"

And, loverlike, he records of **this youngest of
the angels" that "her dress on that day was of a
most noble colotu", a subdued and goodly crimson,
girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited
with her very tender age." Ah! that ''little
frock," that sacred little frock we first saw her
in! Don't we all know it? And the little hand-

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Woman as a Supernatural Bein^ 27

kerchief, scented like the breath of heaven, we
begged as a sacred relic! And

Long after you are dead

I will kiss the shoes of yotir feet. . . .

Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as
a modem writer has said :

Everything a woman wears or touches immedi-
ately incarnates something of herself. A handker-
chief, a glove, a flower— with a breath she endows
them with immortal souls.

Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle
wreath of hair about his arm," the mediaeval knight
riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at his helm,
and all relic- worshipping lovers through the ages
bear witness to that divine supematuraUsm of
woman. To touch the hem of that Kttle frock, to
kiss the mere imprint of those Uttle feet, is to be
purified and exalted. But when did man affect
woman in that way.^ I am tolerably well read in
the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no
parallel expressions of feehng. No passionate
apostrophes of his golf stockings come to my mind,
nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore
on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The im-
maculate collar that spanned his muscular throat
finds no Waller to sing it:

A narrow compass — and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair,

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28 Woman as a Supernatural Bein^

and probably the smartest negligee shirt that ever
sported with the summer winds on a clothes-line
has never caused the smallest flutter in feminine
bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd
— whereas with women, in very deed, it is as with
the temple in Keats's lines :

. . . even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self.

Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the
skirt-dancer has a religious significance, and man's
preoccupation with petticoats is but the popular
recognition of the divinity of woman. All that
she is and does and wears has a ritualistic char-
acter, and she herself commands our reverence
because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred
mysteries, the earthly representative of unearthly
powers, with which she enjoys an intimacy of
communication denied to man. It is not a reason-
able feeling, or one to be reasoned about ; and that
is why we very properly exempt woman from the
necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say,
a reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a
profotmd compliment. For she transcends reason,
and on that very accoimt is mysteriously wise, the
wisest of created things — mother-wise. When we
say ''mother- wit," we mean something deeper than
we realize — ^for what in the universe is wiser than
a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels
of her being with that lore of the infinite which

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Woman as a Supernatural BeinfC ^9

seems to enter her body by means of organs subtler
than the brain?

A certain famous novelist meant well when
recently he celebrated woman as "the mother of
the Inale, '* but such celebration, while ludicrously
masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have
fallen short even if he hsui stopped to mention
that she was the mother of the female, too; for
not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the
race resides the essential mystery of her mother-
hood. We do not value woman merely, if one
may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare,
an economic factor controlling the census returns.
Her gift of motherhood is stranger than that, and
includes spiritual affinities and significances not
entirely represented by visible babes. Her
motherhood is mysterious because it seems to be
one with the universal motherhood of nattu-e, one
with the motherhood that guards and warms to life
the eggs in the nest and the seeds in the hollows of
the hills, the motherhood of the whole strange
vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves
and dreams and breaks into song and flower.
And, as nature is something more than a mother, so
is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible
sign of an inward and spiritual grace and goodness
at the heart of life; and her beauty is the sacred
seal which the gods have set upon her in token of
her supernatural meaning and mission; for all
beauty is the message of the immortal to mortality.
Always when man has been in doubt concerning

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30 "Woman as a Sxipernatural Bein^

his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his
destiny, his heart has been revived by some
beatific vision;

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the
darkness of the world.

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Ill

THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES

CONSIDERING the truly magical power of
money, it must often have struck the
meditative mind — ^particularly that class of medi-
tative mind whose wealth consists chiefly in medi-
tation — to what thoroughly commonplace uses the
modem millionaire applies the power that is his :
in brief, with what little originality, with what a
pitiful lack of imagination, he spends his money.
One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking
thing with it.

On the contrary, he buys precisely the same
things as his fellow-millionaires, the same stereo-
typed possessions — Chouses in Fifth Avenue and
Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the
opera, diamonds and dancing girls; and whether,
as the phrase is, he makes good use of his wealth,
or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good
or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individ-
uality. Philanthropist or profligate, the modem
millionaire is one and the same in his lack of
initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other
in the same tame imitative way.

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32 THe LacK of Imagination

The rich men of the past, the splendid spend-
thrifts of antiquity, seem usually to have combined
a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even some-
thing like poetry; and their extravagances, how-
ever extreme, had usually a saving grace of personal
whim to recommend them to lovers of the picttir-
esque. Sardariapalus and Heliogabalus may have
been whatever else you please, but they were
assuredly not commonplace; and the mere men-
tion of their names vibrates with mankind's
perennial gratitude for splendour and colossal
display, however perverse, and even absurd. The
princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course,
notable examples of the rich man as fantast,
probably because they had the good sense to seek
the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how
best to make an artistic display of their possessions*
Alas, no millionaire today asks a poet's or painter's
assistance in spending his money; yet, were the
modem millionaire to do so, the world might once
more be delighted with such spectacles as Leonardo
devised for the entertainments at the Villa Medici
— those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a
mere vulgar display of Medici money — " a himdred
dollars a plate," so to say — whimsical wit and
beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes.
Leicester's famous welcoming of Elizabeth to
Kenilworth was perhaps the last spectacular
"revel" of its kind to strike the imagination;
though we must not fail to remember with grati-
tude the magnificent Beckford, with his glorious

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Amon|( Millionaires 33

"rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly
pleasure house which naturally sprang from the
same Aladdin-like fancy which produced " Vathek."
I but mention one or two such typical examples
at random to illustrate the difference between past
and present. At present the rich man's paucity of
originality is so painful that we even welcome a
certain millionaire's penchant for collecting fleas —
he, it is rumoured, having paid as much as a
thousand dollars for specimens of a particularly
rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to
understand, but, at least, as we say, it is '* different."
Mr. Carnegie's more comprehensible hobby for
building libraries shows also no little originality
in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted
to literattire. Another millionaire I recently read
of, who refused to pay the smallest account till it
had nm for five years, and would then gladly pay
it, with compound interest at five per cent., has
something refreshing about him; while still an-
other rich eccentric, who has lived on his yacht
anchored near the English coast for some fifteen
years or so in order to avoid payment of his Ameri-
can taxes, and who occasionally amuses himself by
having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown
into the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows
a quaint ingenuity which deserves our gratitude.
Another modem example of how to spend, or
waste, one's money picturesquely was provided
by the late Marquis of Anglesey, a yoimg lord
generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful

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34 THe LacK of Imagination

England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to
spend so much money in the comparatively com-
monplace adventure of taking an amateur drama-
tic company through the English provinces, he
himself, I believe, pla5ring but minor r61es; but
lovers of Gautier's Le Capitaine Fracasse will see
in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate
a beloved dream into a reality — though his credi-
tors probably did not take that view. Neither,
one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently
appreciate his passion for amassing amazing
waistcoats, of which some seven hundred were
foimd in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or
strange and beautiful walking sticks, a like prodi-
gious collection of which were among the fantas-
tic assets which represented his originally large
personal fortime on the winding up of his earthly
affairs. Among these unimaginative creditors were,
doubtless, many jewellers who found it hard to
sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner
habit, particularly when in the society of fair
women, of plimging his hand into his trousers
pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over
with uncut precious stones of many colours, at
the same time begging his companion to take
her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The
Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of
twenty-nine, much lamented, as I have hinted —
by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented,
too, by those for whom his flamboyant personality
and bizarre whims added to that gaiety of nations

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Amon^ Millionaires 35

sadly in need today of such figtires. A friend of
mine owns two of the wonderftil waistcoats. Some-
times he wears one as we Itinch together, and on
such occasions we always drink in silence to the
memory of his fantastic lordship.

These examples of rich men of our own time
who have known how to spend their money with
whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to
my argimient, lights shining, so to say, in a great
darkness. As a general rule, it is the poor or
comparatively poor man, the man lacking the
very necessary material of the art, who is an artist
of this kind. It is the man with but little money
who more often provides examples of the delightful
way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard
Harding Davis will not resent my recalling a
charming feat of his in this connection. Of course
Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we
who admire his writings are glad to know. Still,
successful writer as he is, he is not yet, I presume,
on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the
time which I am about to recall, while already
famous and comparatively prosperous, he had not
attained that security of position which is happily
his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve
or fifteen years ago — and of course I am only
recalling a story well known to all the world —
that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to
send a surprise message to a lady in Chicago who
afterward became his wife, he conceived the idea
of sending it by messenger boy from Charing

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36 THe LacK of Imagination

Cross to Michigan Avenue; and so the little lad,
in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped across
the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand
from Charing Cross to Chancery Lane, raced
across nearly half the continent, as casually as
though he were on an errand from Wall Street
to Park Row, and finding the proper number in
Michigan Avenue, placed the far travelled letter
in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a
receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic
compliments ever paid by a lover to his lady.
What millionaire ever had a fancy like that?

Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this?
There was living in New York some ten years ago
a charming actor, not unknown to the public and
much loved by his friends for, among his other
qualities, his quaint whims. Good actor as he
was, like many other good actors he was usually
out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor.
It was always his poorest moment that he would
choose for the indulgence of an odd, and surely
kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve him-
self, go without drinks, forswear tobacco, deny
himself car fares, till at last he had saved up five
dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished,
he would have his five-dollar bill changed into
five hundred pennies, filling his pockets with
which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and,
seeking neighbourhoods in which children most
abound, he would scatter his arduously accumu-
lated largess among the scrambling boys and girls,

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Amon^ Millionaires 37

literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the
young faces at the miraculous windfall. We often
wondered that he was not arrested for creating a
riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public
traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one
of those ecstatic occasions, there is no question
but that he would have been promptly removed to
Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic.
/ Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this?
Passing along Forty-second Street one afternoon,
I came upon a little crowd, and joining it I found
that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with
a certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman,
who was leaning against a shop front, weeping
bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old
man was very evidently drunk, but there was
something in his weeping deeply pitiful for all
that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less
certainly he was very unhappy — unhappy over
some mysterious something that one or two kindly
questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all
stood helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall,
brisk young man, of the lean, rapid, few-worded
American type, pushed in among us, took a swift
look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his
hand, said "Forget it" — ^no more — and was gone
like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled the
note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me
was the amazed look on the faces of the little
crowd. It was almost as if something super-
natiu-al had happened. All eyes ttuned quickly

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38 THe LacK of Imagination

to catch sight of that strange young man; but he
was already far off striding swiftly up the street.
I have often regretted that I checked my impulse
to catch up with him — for it seemed to me, too,
that I had never seen a stranger thing. Pity or
whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire
do the like with a dollar, create such a sensation
or have so much fim with so small a sum? No;
millionaires never have fancies like that.

Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of
mine, a very poor yoimg lawyer, whose custom it is
to walk uptown from his office at evening, studying
the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to
afford dollar bills. He must work his miracles
with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even smaller
coins; but it is with this art of spending money as
with any other art: the greatness of the artist is
shown by his command over an economy of
material; and the amount of human happiness to
be evoked by the dispensation of a quarter into
the carefully selected hand, at the artistically
chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose,
for example, you were a sandwich man on a bleak
winter day, an old weary man, with hope so long
since faded out of your heart that you would
hardly know what the word meant if you chanced
to read it in print. Thought, too, is dead within
you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly
suffer any more. Practically you are a man who
ought to be in your coffin — at peace in Potter's
field — who, by the mere mechanic habit of exist-

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Amon^ Millionaires 39

ence, motimfuUy parades the public streets, hold-
ing up a banner with some strange device, the
scoff of the pitiless wayfarer — as like as not
supporting against an empty stomach the savoury
advertisement of some newly opened restaurant.
Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through
the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as
with a spiritual deafness, there should penetrate a
kind voice saying : '' Try and keep up your heart,
friend; there are better days ahead''; and with the
voice a hand slipping into yours a coin, and with
both a kind smile, a cheery "Good-bye, ** and a tall,
broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so
to say, kindly legs up the street — gone almost
before you knew he was there. I think it would
hardly matter to you whether the coin were a
quarter or a dime ; but what would matter would
be your amazement that there still was any kind-
ness left on the earth; and perhaps you might
almost be tempted to believe in God again. And
then — ^well, what would it matter to any one what
you did with your miraculous coin? This is my
friend's favourite way of spending his money.
To the extent of his poor means he has constituted
himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich
men.

After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into
the possession of great wealth, would find our
greatest satisfaction in the spending of it much
after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend — that is,
in the artistic distribution of human happiness.

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40 THe L«^K of Imagination

I do not, of course, for a moment include in that
phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by
which a solid block of money on the one side is
applied to the relief of a solid block of human
misery on the other, useful and much to be appreci-
ated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is
not, indeed, the pious use of money that is my
theme, but rather how to get the most fun, the
most personal and original fun, out of it.

The mention of the great caliph suggests a r61e
which is open to any rich man to play, the r61e of
the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a
wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering
away one's evenings at the club, to doflF one's
magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly
multitude of the great city, wandering hither and
thither, watching and listening, and, with one's
cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of
human destinies — ^bringing unhoped-for justice to
the oppressed, succour as out of heaven to the
outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden light-
ning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in
some tragic crisis of human lives; at the moment
when all seemed lost to step out of the darkness
and set all right with a touch of that magic wand.
To walk by the side of lost and lonely men, an
unexpected friend ; to scribble a word on a card and
say, '* Present this tomorrow morning at such a
number Broadway and see what will happen,"
and then to disappear once again into the darkness.
To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that

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Amon^ Millionaires 41

wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine
hope shall fall out of the sky into their lonely
rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary
workmen and all that toil by night while the world
is asleep in soft beds. To come upon the hobo
as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip a purse
into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere
by to see him wake up in the dawn, and watch the
strange antics of his joy — all unsuspected as its
cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he
is being hurried from street comer to street comer
by the police, and say : '* Would you like to go back
to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A boat sails
for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand
dollars. It will buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go
home and bid the signora get ready." And then
to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash
your wand in some other comer of the htmian
multitude. Oh, there would be fun for one's
money, something worth while having money for!
I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may
care to take it up, free of charge. It is a fascinat-
ing opportunity, and its rewards would be incalcul-
able. At the end of the year how wise one would
be in the human story — how filled to overflowing
his heart with the thought of the joy he would
thus have brought to so many lives — all, too, in
pure fun, himself having had such a good time all
the while!

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THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY

' ' r^ E ATH of Mrs. Grundy ! ' ' Imagine opening
JL-^ one's newspaper some morning and finding
in sensational headlines that welcome news. One
recalls the beautifiil old legend of the death of Pan,
and how — ^false report though it happily was —
there once ran echoing through the world a long
heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was
heard wailing three times from land to land,
"Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy
morning I have imagined, one can imagine, too,
another sigh passing from land to land, the sigh
of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lift-
ing of an ineffable burden, as though the earth
stretched its limbs and drew great draughts of a
new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing
that morning ! And I believe that even the church
bells would ring of themselves!

Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but
if it cannot be announced with certitude that Mrs.
Grundy is no more, it may, at all events, be
affirmed without hesitation that she is on her
deathbed, and that surely, if slowly, she is breath-

'42

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THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy 43

ing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which
has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the
free air of the world, will soon be out of her fool-
ish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still
linger on here and there in provincial backwoods
and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres
of civilization it will have passed away forever.

The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in
mystery. In fact, though one thus speaks of her
as so potent a personification, she has of course
never had any real existence. For that very
reason she has been so hard to kill. Nothing is so
long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to
lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or
rather mention, in literature, Mrs. Grundy has
been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being invented to
frighten society, as '* black men" and other
goblins have been wickedly invented by ntirses
to frighten children. In the old play itself where
we first find her mentioned by name, she herself
never comes on the stage. She is only referred to
in frightened whispers. " What will Mrs, Grundy
say?'' is the nervous catchword of one of the
characters, much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp
was wont to defer to the censorious standards of
her invisible friend *'Mrs. Harris." In the case of
the last named chimera, it will be recalled that the
awful moment came when Mrs. Gamp's boon
companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough
to declare her belief that no such person as '*Mrs.
Harris " was, or ever had been, in existence. So the

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44 THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy

awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grimdy,
too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage
to say that no such being as Mrs. Grundy has ever
really existed, or that, even if she has, she shall
exist no more. What wHl Mrs, Grundy say?
Who cares nowadays — ^and so long as nobody cares,
tjae^ood lady is as dead as need be.

' '{ Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear
of his neighbour, the creation of timid souls who
are afraid of being themselves, and who, instead of
living their lives after their own fashion and
desires, choose to live them in hypocritical dis-
comfort according to the standards of others,
standards which in their turn may be held in-
sincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so
on without end — a vicious circle of insincere living
being thus created, in which no man is or does
anything real, or as he himself would nattirally
prefer to be and to do. It is evident that such a

— state of mutual intimidation can exist only in
small commimities, economically interdependent,
and among people with narrow botmdaries and
no horizons. If you live in a village, for example,
and are dependent on the good opinion of your
neighbours for your means of existence, your
morals and your religious belief must be those of
the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only
the rich man in a village who can do as he pleases.
The only thing for the dependent individualist
in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to some
place where a man may at the same time hold his

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THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy 45

job and his own opinions, a place too big to keep
track of its units, too busy to ask irrelevant
questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to
have generated tolerance and free operation for
all.

Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till
quite recently little more than a village, curiously
held in subjection by village superstitions and
village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and
conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a
remarkable enlargement of the human spirit, a
reassertion of the natural rights of man as against
the figments of prurient and emasculate conven-
tions, to which there is no parallel since the
Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths
told, and multitudes have listened gladly that
aforetime must take shelter either in overawed
silence or in utterance so private that they exerted
no influence; and the literature of the day alone,
literature of wide and greedy acceptance, is suf-
ficient warrant for the obituary announcement
which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is
already writing in the hearts, and even in the ac-
tions, of society. The popularity of such writers
as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Mae-
terlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing
on the wall the significance of which cannot be
gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard Shaw,
apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently
conclusive. To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great
dramatist or an original philosopher is, of course,

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46 THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy

absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the last
to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but
even should he be so self-deluded, his immense
coarse usefulness to his day and generation re-
mains, and the value of it can hardly be over-
estimated. What others have said for years as in
a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of utterance,
he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone,
with all the impertiu-bable aplomb of an impudent
showman, having as little self-respect as he has
respect for his public; and, as a consequence, that
vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer
spirits appeal in vain hear for the first time truths
as old as philosophy, and answer to them with as-
senting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like
many another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar
advertisement, if it is to become operative in the
masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar advertisement.
He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom
of thought; and his special equipment for his pecu-
liar revivalist mission comes of his gift for revealing
to the common mind not merely the untruth of
hypocrisy,but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first
of all. He takes some popular convention, that of
medicine or marriage or what you will, and shows
you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously
false. He purges the soul, not with the terror
and pity of tragedy, but with the irresistible
laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think
wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it
by putting wrong thinking on the stage, where

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THe Passing of Mrs. Gruiid;>r 47

you see it for yourself in action, and laugh im-
moderately. Perhaps you had never thought
how droll wrong thinking or no thinldng was
before ; and while you laugh with Shaw at your side-
splitting discovery, the serious message glides in
imostentatiously — ^wrong thinking is not merely
laughable; it is also dangerous, and very imcom-
fortable. And so the showman has done his work,
the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so
much more truth in circulation in imfamiliar
areas of society.

That word ''society" naturally claims some
attention at the hands of one who would speak of
Mrs. Gnmdy, particularly as she has owed her
long existence to a general misconception as to
what constitutes ''society," and to a superstitious
terror as to its powers over the individual. Society
— using the word in its broad sense — has heretofore
been regarded as a vague tremendous entity im-
posing a imiformity of opinion and action on the
individual, imder penalty of a like vague tremen-
dous disapproval for insubordination. Independ-
ent minds, however, have from time to time, and
in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their
own will and pleasure in disregard of this vague
tremendous disapproval, and have, strange to
say, found no sign of the terrible consequences
threatened them, with the result that they, and
the onlookers, have come to the conclusion that
this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of
timorous minds, with no power over the courageous

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48 THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy

spirit. Prom a multitude erf such observations
men and women have come more and more to draw
the conclusion that the solidarity of society is
nothing but a myth, and that so-called society
is merely a loosely connected series of independent
societies, formed by natural selection among their
members, each with its own codes and satisfactions;
and that a man not welcome in one society may
readily find a home for himself in another, or
indeed, if necessary, and if he be strong enough,
rest content with his own society of one.

There was a time when a doubt as to the credi-
bility of the book of Genesis or a belief in the book
of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, but
nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends.
Besides, men and women of strong personal char-
acter are not usually indiscriminately gregarious.
On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any
disparity between them and their neighbours
which tends to safeguard their leisure and protect
them against the social inroads of irrelevant
persons. I recall the case of a famous novelist,
who, himself jealous of his own proper seclusion,
permitted the amenities of his neighbours to
pleasure his wife who was more sociably inclined,
and smilingly allowed himself to be sacrificed once
a week on the altar of a domestic ''at home" day.
It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room-on
Fridays, surrounded by every possible form of
human irrelevancy — ^men and women well enough
in their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if

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TKe Passing of Mrs. Grundy 49

not antipathetic to him and all he stood for —
heroically doing his best to seem really "at home."
But there came a time when he published a book
of decidedly '* dangerous" tendencies, if not worse,
and then it was a delight to see how those various
nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague.
His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and
when you dropped in on Fridays you found there —
only the people he wanted. ''Is not this," he
would laughingly say, **a triumph of natural
selection? See how simply, by one honest action,
I have cut oflf the bores!"

To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate
attempt that any man or woman who would live
their own lives rather than the lives of others is
constantly engaged in making; and more and more
all men and women are realizing that there is only
one society that really counts, the society of people
we want, rather than the people who want us or
don't want us or whom we don't want. And now-
adays the man or woman must be uncomfortable
or imdesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the
society he or she can profitably or conveniently
handle, be their opinions and actions never so
anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more
than any other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the
fear of being alone in the world, cut off from such
intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the
need of at times, has been put an end to by the
ever increasing subdivision of "society" into
friendly seclusions and self-dependent commtmi-
4

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50 THe Passing of Mrs. Grundy

ties of men and women with like ways and points
of view, however disapproved in alien circles.
What "shocks" one circle will seem perfectly
natural in another; and one great truth should
always be held firmly in mind — that the approval
of one's neighbours has never yet paid a man's
bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and
retain the regard of the only society he values —
that of himself and a few friends — ^he can tell
Mrs. Grundy to go — ^where she belongs. And
this happily is — almost — as true nowadays for
woman as for man ; which is the main consideration,
for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on
her own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Gnmdy has
weighed peculiarly hard.

Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral
ideal, one would have some respect for it, but, as
the world has always known, it has been nothing
of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along
been an organized hypocrisy which condoned all it
professed to censure on condition that it was done
in imhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a
Ijdng "respectability." All manner of imclean-
ness had been sanctioned so long as it wore a mask
of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and
wholesome expressions of human nature, undis-
guised manifestations of the joy and romance of
life, have been suppressed and confounded with
their base coimterfeits merely because they have
sought the sunlight of sincerity rather than the
shade where evil does well to hide. Man's proper

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THe Passing of Mrs. Grund;>r 51

delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and
women in each other, the love of beauty, naked
and unashamed, the romantic emotions, and all
that passionate vitality that dreams and builds
and glorifies the human story: all this, forsooth,
it has been deemed wrong even to speak of, save in
colourless euphemisms, and their various drama
has had to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge
pitiably silly indeed in this robustly procreative
world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no
longer to be endured.

It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human
interests into the arena of undaunted discussion,
but things are clearly reen to have already passed
beyond that stage. Discussion has already set
free in the world braver and truer ideals, ideals no
longer afraid of life, but, in the courage of their
joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts.
Men and women refuse any longer to allow their
most vital instincts to be branded with obloquy,
and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted at
the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of
propriety. On every hand we find the right to
happiness asserted in deeds as well as words. The
essential purity of actions and relations to which
a merely technical or superstitious irregularity
attaches is being more and more acknowledged,
and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are
everywhere giving way before the daylight of
common sense. Love and youth and pleasure
are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights

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52 l^e Passing of Mrs. Grundy

as elemental as those forces of the universe by
which the stars are preserved from wrong, and the
merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions which have
so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms
at cockcrow. It is no longer sinful to be happy —
even in one's own way; and the extravagances of
passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries
of pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-
visaged public opinion, but encouraged, or, if
necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of
natural forces, and as welcome additions to the
gaiety of nations. The true sins against humanity
are, on the other hand, being exposed and pil-
loried with a scientific eye for their essential
qualities.

. - . . The cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuqng eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.

Man's virtues and vices are being subjected
to a re-classification, in the course of which they
are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, to be
changing places. The standards of punishment
applied by Dante to his inferno of lost souls is
being, every year, more closely approximated;
warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as
having usually some '* relish of salvation" in them,
are being judged lightly, when they are accounted
sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of essential

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TKe Paasin^ of Mrs. Grundy 5J

selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and
cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes
against God and man. The individual is being
allowed more and more to be the judge of his own
actions, and all actions are being estimated more
in regard to their special relation and environment,
as the relativity of right and wrong, that most
just of modem conceptions, is becoming under-
stood. The hidden sins of the pious and respectable
are coming disastrously into the light, and it no
longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy
on Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the
rest of the week; while the negative virtues of
abstinence from the common human pleasures go
for less than nothing in a world that no longer
regards the theatre, the race course, and the card
table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the
especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy * * virtues *'
are fast disappearing, and piano legs are once more
being worn in their natural nudity. The general
trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such
apparent contradictions of it as occasionally get
into the newspapers are of no general significance;
as when, for example, some exquisitely refined
Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or
blushingly covers up the nakedness of a beautiful
statue, or comes out strong on the question of
woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has
the courage to go into the water with somewhat
less than her entire walking costume; or, again,
when some crank invokes the blue laws against

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54 THe Passing of Mrs. Gnindy

Sunday golf or tennis; or some spinster association
puts itself on record against woman's smoking: all
these are merely provincial or parochial exceptions
to the onward movement of morals and manners,
mere spasmodic twitchings, so to say, of the poor
old lady on her deathbed. We know well enough
that she who would so sternly set her face against
the feminine cigarette would have no objection
to one of her votaries carrying on an affair with
another woman's husband — not the least in the
world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of
the courts. And such is a sample of her morality
in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no real
sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false
shame and false morality will go — but true mod-
esty, **the modesty of nature," true propriety,
true religion — and incidentally true love and true
marriage— will all be immeasurably the gainers
by the death of this hypocritical, nasty-minded
old lady.

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MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE

THERE have, of course, in all ages been those
who made a business of running down the
times in which they lived — tiresome people for
whom everything had gone to the dogs — or was
rapidly going — tmcomfortable critics who could
never make themselves at home in their own
century, and whose weary shibboleth was that of
some legendary perfect past.

In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the
name of laudator temporis acii; and, if we have
no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for the type,
we still have the type no less ubiquitously with
us. The bugbear of such is "modem science,"
or "modem thought,*' a monster which, we are
frequently assured, is fast devouring all the
beautiful and good in human life, a Moloch fed on
the dreams and ideals and noble faiths of man.
Modernity! For such "modernity'' has taken
the place of "Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous
people have no eye for the beautiful patterns and
fantasies of change, none of that faith which
rejoices to watch -'the roaring loom of time"

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56 Modem A.ids to R^omance

weaving ever new garments for the unchanging
eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough,
they see only atheism, instead of the vitality of
spiritual evolution; in new affirmations they scent
only dangerous denials. With the more grave
misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not
the place to deal, though actually, if there were any
ground for belief in a modem decay of religion, we
might seriously begin to believe in the alleged
decay of romance.

Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead.
Modem science has killed it. It is essentially a
"thing of the past" — ^an affair presumably of
stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It
cannot breathe in what is spoken of as "this mate-
rialistic age."

The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the
muddle-headed multitude are surely the only
people for whom they are true. It is they alone
who are the materialists, confusing as they do the
spirit of romance with its worn-out garments of
bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly otit
of court as not to be worth controverting, except
for the opporttmity they give one of confidently
making the joyous affirmation that, far from
romance being dead in our day, there never was
a more romantic age than otus, and that never
since the world began has it offered so many
opportimities, so many facilities for romance as
at the present time.

In fact, a very little thinking will show that of

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Modern Aids to Romance 57

all those benefited by "the blessings of modem
science/' it is the lovers of the community who
as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed,
so true is this that it might almost seem as though
the modem laboratory has been run primarily
from romantic motives, to the end that the old
f^)roach should be removed and the course of
tme love run magically smooth. Valuable as
the telephone may be in business affairs, it is
simply invaluable in the affairs of love; and mecha-
nicians the world over are absorbed in the problem
of aerial flight, whether they know it or not,
chiefly to provide Love with wings as swift as his
desire.

Distance may lend enchantment to those whom
we prefer to appreciate from afar, but nearness is
the real enchantment to your true lover, and dis-
tance is his natural enemy. Distance and the
slow-footedness of Time are his immemorial evils.
Both of these modern science has all but annihi-
lated. Consider for a moment the conditions
under which love was carried on in those old days
which some people find so romantic. Think what
a comparatively short distance meant then, with
snail-paced precarious mails, and the only means of
comnnmication horses by land, and sailing ships
by sea. How men and women had the courage to
gp on long journeys at all away from each other
in those days is hard to realize, knowing what an
impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery imme-
diately fell between them with the winding of the

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58 Modern A^ids to Romance

coach horn, or the last wave of the plumed hat as
it disappeared behind the last turning of the road
— leaving those at home with nothing for company
but the yearning horizon and the aching, uncom-
municative hours. Days, weeks, months, even
years, must go by in waiting for a word — and when
at last it came, brought on lumbering wheels or
at best by some courier on his steaming mud-
splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already
grown old and cold and perhaps long since untrue.

Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's
heart news on some chance soldier limping back
from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy
Land with scallop shell and staff!

Distance was indeed a form of death under such
conditions — no wonder men made their wills as
they set out on a journey — and when actual physi-
cal death did not intervene, how much of that
slow death-in-life, that fading of the memory and
that nimibing of the affections which absence too
often brings, was even still more to be feared.
The loved face might indeed return, looking much
the same as when it went away, but what of the
heart that went a- journeying, too? What even
of the hearts that remained at home?

The chances of death and disaster not even
modem science can forestall, though even these
it has considerably lessened ; but that other death
of the heart, which comes of the slow starvation
of silence and absence, it may be held to have all
but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians,

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Modern A.ids to R^cmance 59

you may be seas or continents away from her whom
your soul loveth, yet *'at her window bid good-
morrow" as pimctually as if you lived next door;
or serenade her by electricity — at all hours of the
night. If you sigh in New York, she can hear you
and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon her very
face will be carried to you at any moment of the
day along the magic wires. Nor will you need to
wait for the postman, but be able to read her
flowerlike words as they write themselves out on
the luminous slate before you, at the very moment
as she leans her fragrant bosom upon her electric
desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't
romantic, one may well ask what is!

To take the telephone alone, surely the romance
of Pyramus and Thisbe, with their primitive hole
in the wall, was a tame affair compared with the
possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which
you can talk with your love not merely through a
wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You
can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sotmd-
ing sea, and bid her ** sleep well'* over leagues of
primeval forest, and through the stoniest-hearted
city her soft voice will find its way. Even in
mid-ocean the '* wireless" will bring you news of
her mal'de-mer. And more than that ; should you
wish to carry her voice with you from place to
place, science is once more at your service with
another magic toy — the phonograph — ^by which
indeed she can still go on speaking to you, if you
have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave.

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6o Modern Aids to I^omaxioe

The telegraph, the telephone, the " wireless/'
the phonograph, the electric letter writer — such
are the modern '* conveniences" of romance; and^
should an elopement be on foot, what are the
fastest post-chaise or the fleetest horses compared
with a high-powered automobile? And when the
airship really comes, what romance that has ever
been will compare for excitement with an elopement
through the sky?

Apart from the practical conveniences of these
various new devices, there is a poetic quality
about the mere devices themselves which is full
of fascination and charm. Whether we call up
our sweetheart or our stockbroker, what a thing
of enchantment the telephone is merely in itself!
Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into
poetry; and, indeed, the more prosaic the uses to
which we put them, the more marvellous by con-
trast their marvel seems. Even our businesses
are carried on by agencies more mysterious and
truly magical than anything in the Arabian Nights^
and all day long we are playing with mysterious
natural laws and exquisite natural forces as^ in a
small way, when boys we used to delight in our
experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and Leyden
jars. Science has thus brought an element of
romantic *'fun," so to speak, even into our stores
and our counting-houses. I wonder if ** Central*'
realizes what a truly romantic emplojrment is hers?

But, pressed into the high service of love, one
sees at once what a poetic fitness there is in their

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Modem Aida to R^omance 61

employ, and how our much-abused modem science
has found at last for that fastidious god an appro-
priately dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse
and vulgar indeed seem the ancient servitors and
the uncouth machinery by which the divine busi-
ness of the god was carried on of old. Today,
through the skill of science, the august lightning
has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes
of air and sea hasten to do his bidding.

Modem science, then, so far from being an
enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be
its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift
and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an
indulgent minister to its lighter fancies. Be it
whim or emergency, the modem laboratory is
equally at the service of romance, equally ready
to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.

Not only, however, has modem science thus
put itself at the service of romance, by supplying
it with its various magic machinery of communica-
tion, but modem thought — that much maligned
bugbear of timorous minds — ^has generated an
atmosphere increasingly favourable to and sympa-
thetic with the romantic expression of himian
nature in all its forms.

The world has unmistakably grown yotmger
again during the last twenty years, as though —
which, indeed, is the fact — it had thrown off an
accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free
from imaginary middle-aged restrictions and pre-
occupations. All over the world there is a wind

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62 Modern A.i<ls to R^omance

of youth blowing such as has not freshened the
air of time since the days of Elizabeth. Once
more the spring of a new Renaissance of Htmian
Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young,
and the age of romance both for men and women
has been indefinitely extended. No one gives up
the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely
tired of playing it. Mopish conventions are less
and less allowed to restrict that free and joyous
play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is
the essence of all romance. More and more the
world is growing to love a lover, and one has only
to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic
are the times to any generous and adventurous
display of the passions.

This more humane temper is the result of many
causes. The disintegration of religious supersti-
tion, and the substitution in its stead of spirittial
ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these.
All that was good in Puritanism has been retained
by the modern spirit, while its narrowing and
numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying,
provincial side have passed or are passing in the
regenerating sunlight of what one might call a
spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural
forces and natural laws as inherently pure and
mysteriously sacred. Thus the way of a man
with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but
it is more and more realized that in its ro-
mance and its multifarious refinements of devel-
opment are the '*law and the prophets," the

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Modem A.ids to R^omance 63

*' eternal meanings" of natural religion and social
spirituality.

Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting
in the breaking down of caste barriers, is all to
the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph
and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are
passing, away. If Romeo and Juliet make a
tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame
their own mismanagement, for the world is with
them as it has never been before, and all sensible
fathers and mothers know it.

Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes
tends incalculably to smooth that course of true
love once so proverbially rough, but now indeed in
danger of being made too tmexcitingly smooth.
Yet if, as a result, certain old combinations of
romance are becoming obsolete, new ones, no
less picturesque, and even more vital in their
drama, are being evolved every day by the new
conditions. Those very inroads being so rapidly
and successfully made by woman into the imme-
morial business of man, which are superficially
regarded by some as dangerous to the tenderer
sentiments between men and women, are, on the
contrary, merely widening the area of romance,
and will eventually develop, as they can be seen
already developing, a new chivalry and a new
poetry of the sexes no less deep and far more many-
;sided than the old. The robuster comradeship
between the two already resulting from the more
4u:tive sharing of common interests cannot but

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64 Modern Aid9 to IVomanoe

tend to a deeper and more exhilarating union of
man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage
literally of true minds as well as bodies than was
possible in the old regime, when the masculine
and feminine ''spheres" were kept so jealously
distinct and only allowed to touch at theelementary
points of relationship. There has always been a
thrill of adventure when either has been admitted
a little farther into the other's world than was
customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be
when men and women entirely share in each other's
lives, without fictitious reserves and mysteries,
and face the whole adventure of life squarely and
completely together, all the more husband and
wife for being comrades as well — as many men
and women of the new era are already joyously
doing.

And, merely on the surface, what a new roman-
tic element woman has introduced into the daily
drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence in
their offices! She cannot always be beautiful,
poor dear, and she is not invariably gracious, it is
true; yet, on the whole, how much the atmosphere
of office life has gained in amenity by the coming
of the stenographer, the typewriter, and the
telephone girl, not to speak of her frequent deco-
rative value in a world that has hitherto been
uncompromisingly harsh and imadomed! Men
may affect to ignore this, and cannot afford indeed
to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that
have so considerably supplanted those misbe-

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Modern Aids to IVomance 65

gotten young miscreants known as ofSce-boys, a
vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is,
all the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and
her prosaic tasks, silently diffusing about her that
eternal mystery which she can never lose, be her
occupations never so masculine.

There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and
her absurd little lace handkerchiefs and her furtive
powder puff and her bits of immemorial ornaments
and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of
it. Never mind how grimly and even brusquely
you may be dictating to her specifications for
steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfimie cannot
help floating across to your roUtop desk, and you
are a man and she is a woman, for all that; and,
instead of having her with you at fag ends of your
days, you have her with you all day long now —
and your sisters and your sweethearts are so much
the nearer to you all day for her presence, and,
whether you know it or not, you are so much the
less a brute because she is there.

Where the loss to romance comes in in these

admirable new arrangements of modern commerce

it is hard to see. Of course a new element of

danger is thus introduced into the routine of our

daily lives, but when was danger an enemy to

romance? The ''bright face" of this particular

"danger" who would be without? The beloved

•essayist from whom that last phrase is, of course,

• adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry

is ''to domesticate the recording angel." One

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66 Modern Aids to R.oinance

might say that the modem business man has
officialized the ministering angel — perhaps some
other forms of angel as well.

In their work, then, as in their play, men and
women are more and more coming to share with
each other as comrades, and really the fun of life
seems in no wise diminished as a consequence.
Rather the contrary, it would seem, if one is to
judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers.
Yet it is not very long ago that man looked as-
kance at woman's wistful plea to take part even in
his play. He had the old boyish fear that she
would spoil the game. However, it didn't take
him long to find out his mistake and to know
woman for the true ' ' sport " that she can be. And
in that discovery it was another invention of that
wicked modern science that was the chief, if
humble seeming, factor, no less than that eclipsed
but inexpressibly useful instnmient (of flirtation)
in the hands of a kind providence, the bicycle.

The service df the bicycle to the "emancipation
of woman" movements has perhaps never been
acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little
thought will make evident how far-reaching that
service has been. When that near day arrives on
which woman shall call herself absolutely "free,"
should she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom
by some monimient of her gratitude, let the monu-
ment be neither to man nor woman, however
valiant in the fight, but simply let it take the form
of an enthroned and laurelled bicycle — ^for the

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Modern i\icls to IVomance 67

moment woman motmted that apparently innocent
machine, it carried her on the high-road to free-
dom. On that she could go not only where she
pleased, but — what is even more to the point —
with whom she pleased. The free companionship
of man and woman had begtm. Then and forever
ended the old system of courtship, which seems so
laughable and even incredible today. One was
no longer expected to pay court to one's beloved,
sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a chill
drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-
conducive, presence of still chillier maiden aunts.
The doom of the duenna was sounded; the chill
drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road"
and the whispering woodland; and soon it is to
come about that a man shall propose to his wife
high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly
swaying at anchor in the wake of the evening star.

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THE LAST CALL

1 DON'T know whether or not the cry "Last
call for the dining-car" affects others as it
affects me, but for me it always has a stem,
fateful sotmd, suggestive of momentous oppor-
tunity fast slipping away, opportimity that can
never come again; and, on the occasions when
I have disregarded it, I have been haunted
with a sense of the neglected ''might-have-
been."

Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been
connected with any illusions as to the mysterious
quality of the dinner that I have thus foregone.
I have been well enough aware that the only actual
opportunity thus evaded has been most probably
that of an unusually bad dinner, exorbitantly paid
for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with
my feeling, which, indeed, has come of a sugges-
tiveness in the cry beyond the occasion, a sense
conveyed by the words, in combination with the
swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable
swift passage and gliding away of all things. Ah!
so soon it will be the last call — ^for so many pleas-

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The Last Call 69

ant things — that we would fain arrest and enjoy
a little longer in a world that with tragic velocity
is flowing away from us, each moment, **like the
waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it
will be the "last call" in dead earnest — the last
call for the joy of life and the glory of the
world. The grass is already withering, the
flower already fading; and that bird of time, with
so short a way to flutter, is relentlessly on the
wing.

Now some natures hear this call from the begin-
ning of their lives. Even their opulent spendthrift
youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet
days die," by every strain of music, by every
gathered flower. All their joy is haunted, like
the poetry of WiUiam Morris, with the wistful
burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands,
with all their pomp and riot of exuberant green
and gold, are anything but safe from this low
sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty,
pressed desperately close as if to imprison the
divine fugitive moment, the song seems to come
nearest. Who has not held some loved face in
his hands, and gazed into it with an almost agon-
izing effort to realize its reality, to make etern-
ally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it
and the transfiguring moment for ever, all the
time pierced with the melancholy knowledge
that tomorrow all will be as if this had never
been, and life once more its dull disenchanted
seK?

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70 The Last Call

Too soon shall morning take the stars away,
And all the world be up and open-eyed,

This magic night be turned to common day —
Under the willows on the riverside.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its
melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that
melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. If
one enchanted moment nms to an end, it may be
reasonably sure for a long time yet of many more
enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only
taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And,
though its poets may warn it that "youth's a
stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously believe
it. Others may have come to an end of their cake,
but its cake is going to last for ever. Alas, for
the day when it is borne in upon us with a tragic
suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that
he has been robbed of his hoard, that unaccount-
ably the best part of the cake has been eaten, that
perhaps indeed only a few desperate crtunbs
remain. A bleak laughter blends now with that
once luxurious melancholy. There is a song at
our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephis-
topheles. Our blood runs cold. We listen in
sudden fear. It is life singing out its last
caU.

The time of this call, the occasion and the man-
ner of it, mercifully vary with individuals. Some
fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till they lie
on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted

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The Last Call 71

with such a generotis-sized cake of youth that it has
lasted all their lives, or they have possessed a
great art in the eating of it. Though I may add
here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is
no good way. That way you are liable to find it
grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough,
it is often seen that those who all their lives have
eaten their cake most eagerly have quite a little
of it left at the end. There are no hard and fast
rules for the eating of your cake. One can only
find out by eating it ; and, as I have said, it may be
your luck to disprove the proverb and both eat
your cake and have it.

For a dreary majority, however, the cake does
come to an end, and for them henceforth, as
Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and
straight and dusty to the grave. For them that
last call is apt to come usually before simset — and
the great American question arises: What are they
going to do about it? That, of course, every one
must decide for himself, according to his inclina-
tions and his opportunities. But a few general
considerations may be of comfort and even of
greater value.

There is one thing of importance to know about
this last call, that we are apt to imagine we hear
it before we actually do, from a nervous sense that
it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps
is growing grey, and our years beginning to accu-
mulate. We hypnotize ourselves with our chro-
nology, and say with Emerson:

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72 The Last Call

It is time to grow old,
To take in sail.

Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but
may be it isn't, and we don't. Youth is largely a
habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow
ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions
and superstitions, both habits may be prolonged
far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need
never be abandoned tmless we become sincerely
and unregretfully tired of them. I can well
conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as
reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the
passions with the advance of age to "being set
free from service to a band of madmen."

When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable
with him. He has retired of his own free will from
the banquet of life, having had his fill, and is
content. Our image of the last call does not apply
to him, but rather to those who, with appetites
still keen, are sternly warned that for them, willy-
nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison
fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their
portion. No more ortolans and transporting
vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal
and occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chap-
ter. No wonder that some, hearing this dread
sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to clutch
at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their
despairing determination to have, if need be, a
last "good time" and die. Their efforts are apt

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The Last Call 73

to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and
the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of
the "romantic" outbursts of aging people. For
myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender
sympathy. I know that they have heard that
last fearful call to the dining-car of life — and, poor
souls, they have probably found it closed. Their
mistake has been in waiting so long for the call.
From various causes, they have mismanaged their
lives. They have probably lived in a numbing
fear of their neighbours, who have told them that
it is bad manners to eat one's cake in public, and
wicked to eat it in private; and any one who is
fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his
life for him instead of living it himself deserves
what he gets, or rather doesn't get.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the
beginning of wisdom. Neighbours, at the best,
are an impertinent encroachment on one's privacy,
and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our
development. Generally speaking, it is the man
or woman who has lived with least fear of his
neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last
call. Nothing in retrospect is so barren as a life
lived in accordance with the hypocrisies of society.
For those who have never lived, and are now fain
to begin living when it is too late, that last call
comes indeed with a ghastly irony. But for those
who have fearlessly lived their lives, as they came
along, with Catullus singing their vivamus atque
atnemus, and practising it, too ; for those, if indeed

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74 The Last Call

the last call must come, they will be able to support
it by the thought that, often as in the past life has
called to them, it has never called to them in vain.
We are apt sometimes to belittle our memories,
but actually they are worth a good deal; and should
the time come when we have little to look forward
to, it will be no small comfort to have something
to look back on. And it won't be the days when
we dddtiH that we shall recall with a sense of
possession, but the days and nights when we most
emphatically did. Thank God, we did for once
hold that face in our hands in the woodland!
Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild
night of nights in the city!

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou

shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the

nymphs in the brake.

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth
living. The stalks of the days are endurable only
because they occasionally break into flower. It is
our sins of omission alone that we come in the end
to regret. The temptations we resisted in our
youth make themselves rods to scourge our middle
age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes
have unconsciously taken, for that they are the
simplest truth any honest dying man would tell
you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by
"E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life,
a poem I shall beg leave to quote here, because.

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The Last Call 75

though it is to be found in that poet's volume, it is
not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be
by those who need its lesson. I quote it, too,
from memory, so I trust that the length of time I
have remembered it may be set to my credit
against any verbal mistakes I make.

**If, on some balmy summer night,
You rowed across the moon path white.
And saw the shining sea grow fair
With silver scales and golden hair,
What would you do?"

**I wotdd be wise
And shut my ears and shut my eyes,
Lest I shotdd leap into the tide
And clasp the seamaid as I died."

"But if you thus were strong to flee
From sweet spells woven of moon and sea,
Are you quite sure that you would reach,
Without one backward look, the beach?"

**I might look back, my dear, and then
Row straight into the snare again,
Or, if I safely got away —
Regret it to my d3di;ig day."

He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave
error to give ourselves grudgingly to our experi-
ences. Only in a whole-hearted surrender of
ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive
back all it has to give us, and by the active recep-
tivity of our natures attract toward us other such

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76 The Last Call

moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-
ready romantic attitude toward life is the best
preservative against the ennui of the years. Ad-
ventures, as the proverb says, are to the adven-
turous, and, as the old song goes:

He either fears his fate too much

Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch

To gain or lose it all.

And the spirit of the times is happily growing
more clement toward a greater fulness and variety
of life. The world is growing kinder toward the
fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic
pursuit of joy is no longer frowned down by an-
aemic and hypocritical philosophies. The old
gods of energy and joy are coming to their own
again, and the lives of strong men and fair women
are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of curates
and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has
begim to find out her mistake, and is. out for her
share of the fun and the foolishness with the rest.
Negative morality is fast becoming discredited,
and many an old '*Thou shalt not" is coming to
seem as absurd as the famous Blue Laws of Con-
necticut. " Self -development, not self-sacrifice," —
a favourite dictum of Grant Allen's, — is growing
more and more to be the formula of the modem
world; and, if a certain amoimt of self-sacrifice is
of necessity included in a healthy self-development,
the proportion is being reduced to a rational limit.

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The Last Call 77

One form of self-sacrifice, at all events, is no
longer demanded of us — the wholesale sacrifice
of our own opinions. The possibility that there
may be two opinions or a dozen or a hundred on
one matter, and that they may be all different,
yet each one of them right in its proper application,
has dawned forcibly on the worid, with the con-
ception of the relativity of experience and the
modification of conditions. Nowadays we recog-
nize that there are as many ** rights" and as
many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to
be happy in our own way, instead of somebody
else's, is one of the first laws of nature, health, and
virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal
vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary
laws. We have all of us amusing memories of
those severe old housekeepers who for no inclem-
ency of the weather would allow a fire in the
grate before the first of October, and who regarded
a fire before that date as a positive breach of the
moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain
old-fashioned moralists whose icy clutch on our
warm-blooded humanity we no longer suffer.
Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to,
and if we prefer to keep them going all the year
rotmd, it is no one's business but our own. Happy
is the man who, when the end comes, can say with
Landor:

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.

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78 The Last Call

Such a one will have little need to fear that last
call of which I have been writing. In Kipling's
phrase, he has taken his fun where he found it,
and his bams are well stocked with the various
harvests of the years. Not his the wild regret for
having "safely got away." Rather he laughs to
remember how often he was taken captive by the
enchantments of the world, how whenever there
was any piece of wildness afoot he was always
found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes
were out on Moimt Cithaeron, and the mad Evoe I
Evoe I rang through the moonstruck woods, be
sure he was up and away, with ardent hands
clutched in the flying tresses. Ah ! the vine leaves
and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, the clash
of the cymbals ^nd the dithyramb shrilling up to
the stars ! " If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite ! '*
He is no hypocrite, no weary '*king ecclesiast,'*
shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in
which he can no longer share. He frankly ac-
knowledges that then came in the sweet o' the
year, and he is still as young as the yoimgest by
virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the
Dionysiac cup of life.

At the same time, while he may not tingratefully
rejoice with Sophocles at being ''set free from
service to a band of madmen," that ripening of
his nature which comes most fruitfully of a gen-
erous exercise of its powers will have instinctively
taught him that secret of the transmutation of the
passions which is one of the most precious rewards

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The Last Call 79

of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong
I>assion for fair women to become insensibly and
tmregretfully transmuted into a passion for first
editions, and you may become quite sincerely con-
tent that a yoimger fellow catch the flying maiden,
if only you can catch yon flitting butterfly for
your collection. And, strangest of all, your grand
passion for your own remarkable self may suffer
a miraculous transformation into a warm appreci-
ation for other people. It is true that you may
smile a little sadly to find them even more inter-
esting than yourself. But such passing sadness
has the relish of salvation in it. Self is a weary
throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be
free of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures
of existence.

But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you
who read this may have no such assets of a wilful
well spent life to draw on as he whom I have
pictured. It may be that you have starved your
emotions and fled your opportunities, or you may
simply have had bad luck. The golden moments
seldom came your way. The wilderness of life
has seldom blossomed with a rose. "The breast
of the nymph in the brake" and *'the chimes at
midnight" were not for you. And there is a
menacing murmur of autumn in the air. The
days are shortening, and the twilight comes early,
with a chilly breath. The crickets have stopped
singing, and the garden is sad with elegiac blooms.
The chrysanthemtim is growing on the grave of the

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8o The Last Call

rose. Perhaps already it is too late — ^too late for life
and joy. You must take to first editions and
entomology and other people's interests in good
earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there
comes a cry — a. soimd of cymbals and flutes and
dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have one
chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is
better than nothing. Hurry and join the music,
ere it be too late. For this is the last call!

When time lets slip a little perfect hour,
Take it, for it will not come again.

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VII

THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY

ALL religions have periods in their history which
are looked back to with retrospective fear
and trembling as eras of persecution, and each
religion has its own book of martyrs. The reli-
gion of beauty is no exception. Far from it.
For most other religions, however they may have
differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing
beauty, and even in Greece there were stem
sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white
bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain.
Christianity has not been beauty's only enemy,
by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs
of Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless,
be the Christian persecutions of beauty that will
bulk largest in the record — for the Beauty of
Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been
warring creeds from the beginning.

At the present moment, there is reason to fear,
or to rejoice — ^according to one's individual lean-
ings — ^that the Religion of Beauty is gaining upon
its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Re-
naissance has there been such a widespread impulse
6 8i

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82 THe Persecutions of Beauty

to assert Beauty and Joy as the ideals of hiiman
life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes
on the youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the
city thoroughfares with their laughing, heartless
faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan"
to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian
their homes and their country. In our time, at
all events. Beauty has never walked the streets
with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of
security, and in her eyes and in her carriage, as in
her subtly shaped and subtly scented garments,
so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, out-
worn, proprieties to frown upon her all they please.
From the humblest shop-girl to the greatest lady,
there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet
maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever
cost, by whatever means. This, of course, at all
periods, has been woman's chief thought, but
till recently, in our times, she has more or less
affected a certain secrecy in her intention. She
has hinted rather than fully expressed it, as though
fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibi-
tion of her enchantments. It has hardly seemed
proper to her heretofore to be as beautiful in the
public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir.
But now, bless you, she has no such misgivings,
and the flower-like effect upon the city streets is
as dazzling as if, some fine morning in Constanti-
nople, all the ladies of the various harems should
suddenly appear abroad without their yashmaks,
setting fire to the hearts and turning the heads of

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THe Persecutions of Beauty 83

the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison
nearer home, it is abnost as startling as if the
ladies of the various musical comedies in town
should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in
broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of
"make-up" and diaphanous draperies. I swear
that it can be no more thrilling to penetrate into
that mysterious paradise '* behind the scenes,'*
than to walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer
afternoons, in the present year of grace, — chum-
ming to one's self that wistful old song, which
goes something like this:

The girls that never can be mine!

In every lane and street
I hear the rustle of their gowns,

The whisper of their feet;
The sweetness of their passing by.

Their glances strong as wine,
Provoke the unpossessive sigh —

Ah! girls that never can be mine.

So audacious has Beauty become in these latter
days, so proudly she walks abroad, making so
superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, thighed
like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at
whiles a fairy creature of ivory and gossamer and
fragrance, with a look in her eyes of secret gar-
dens; and so much is the wide world at her feet,
and one with her in the vanity of her fairness—
that I sometimes fear an impending dizs ircc, when
the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert

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84 TKe Persecxitions of Beauty

itself, and some stern priest thunder from the
pulpit of worldly vanities and the wrath to come.
Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some
modem Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire
of Vanities in Madison Square, on which, to the
droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be
cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the
puffs and rats, the powder and the rouge, the
darling stockings, and all such concomitant be-
witcheries that today make Manhattan a veri-
table Isle of Circe, all to go up in savage sectarian
flame, before the eyes of melancholy yoimg men,
and filling all the city with the perfume of
beauty's holocaust. At street corners too will
stand great books in which weeping maidens will
sign their names, swearing before high heaven,
to wear nothing but gingham and bed-ticking for
the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a day
may well come, as it has often come before,
and certainly will, if women persist in being so
deliberately beautiful as they are at present.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man
seems to have associated the idea of evil with
beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear,
while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its
hypnotic attraction. Strangely enough, beauty
has been regarded as the most dangerous enemy of
the soul, and the powers of darkness that are
supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering
psyche, so precious and apparently so perishable,
are usually represented as taking shapes of be-

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THe Persecutions of Beauty 85

guiling loveliness — lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs,
and witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurk-
ing in its most innocent forms, the grim ascetic
has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, and
whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always
beauty that is made the first victim, whether it
take the form of a statue, a stained-glass window,
or a hair-ribbon. ''Homeliness is next to God-
liness," though not officially stated as an article
of the Christian creed, has been one of the most
active of all Christian tenets. It has always been
easier far for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
heaven than a gloriously beautiful woman. Pre-
sumably such a one might be in danger of corrupt-
ing the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such
apparitions.

In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the
democratic origin of the Christian religion is sug-
gestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever found,
is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus in-
stinctively excites the fear and jealousy of the
common people. When, in the third century.
Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work
of destroying the ''Pagan" temples, tearing down
the beautiful calm gods and goddesses from their
pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble
limbs with brutish mallets, it was not, we may be
sure, of the danger to their precious souls they
were thinking, but of their patrician masters who
had worshipped these fair images, and paid great
sums to famous sculptors for such adornment of

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86 THe Persecutions of Beauty

their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human enough,
for to those mobs beauty had long been associated
with oppression. Yet how painful to picture those
golden marbles, in all their immortal fairness,
confronted with the hideousness of those fanatic
ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religibnists,
forsooth, that thus break with foolish hands and
trample with swinish hoofs the sacred vessels of
divine dreams. Who would not

rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, —

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea.
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. .

One can imagine the priest of such a violated
sanctuary stealing back in the quiet. moonlight,
when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking
amid all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered
carvings, for any poor fragments of god or goddess
at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had minis-
tered so long; and gathering such as he might
find, — maybe a mighty hand, still the hand of a
god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls
of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the
bruised breast of the goddess, white as a water-
lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some secret
comer of the sacred grove, how reverently he
would bury the precious fragments away from

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THe Persecutions of Beauty 87

profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a myste-
rious changing world, from which glory and love-
liness were thus surely passing away. Other
priests, as we know, more forttmate than he, had
forewamings of such impending sacrilege, and
were able to anticipate the mob, and bury their
beautiful images in safe and secret places, there
to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the
glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A re-
surrection, however, by no means free from danger,
even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence;
for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save
in the Vatican, and the ignorant priest of the
remote village where the spade of the peasant had
revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare
the beautiful image an evil spirit, and have it
broken up forthwith and grotmd for mortar, imless
some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched
with '*the new learning," chanced to be on hand
to save it from destruction. Yes! even at that
time when beauty was being victoriously bom
again, the mad fear of her raged with such panic
in certain minds that, when Savonarola lit his
great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as Botti-
celli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his
own paintings into the flames — to the lugubrious
rejoicings of the sanctimonious Piagnoni — as
Savonarola's followers were called; predecessors
of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries
later, were to turn England into a sort of white-
washed prison, with crop-headed psalm-singing

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88 THe Persecutions of Beauty-
religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the

First

bow'd his comely head
Down, as upon a bed,

at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the
block at his side. Ugliness, parading as piety,
took her place, and once more the breaking of
images began, the banishment of music, the ex-
communication of grace, and gentle manners, and
personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and
a happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the
devil, — something like hanging matters — ^but hap-
py hearts and beautiful smiles must have been
rare things in England during the Puritan Com-
monwealth. Such as were left had taken refuge
in France, where men might worship God and
Beauty in the same church, and where it was not
necessary, as at Oxford, to bury your stained-glass
windows out of the reach of the mob — ^those

Storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light,

which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate.
Doubtless, that English Puritan persecution was
the severest that Beauty has been called upon to
endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to
this day, particularly in New England, where if
the sculptured images of goddess and nymph are
not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is

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The Persecutions of Beauty 89

from no goodwill towards them, but rather from
an ingrained reverence for any form of property,
even though it be nude, and where, at all events,
they are under the strict surveillance of a highly
proper and respectable police, those distinguished
guardians of American morals.

It is worth while to try and get at the reason for
this wide-spread, deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for
some reason there must surely be. Such instinc-
tive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental.
And so soon as one begins to analyse the attitude
of religion towards beauty, the reason is not far
to seek.

All religions are made up of a spiritual element
and a moral element, the moral element being the
temporary, practical, so to say, working side of
religion, concerned with this present world, and
the limitations and necessities of the various
societies that compose it. The spiritual element,
the really important part of religion, has no concern
-with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws,
or conduct. It concerns itself only with the
eternal properties of things. Its business is the
contemplation and worship of the mystery of life,
*' the mystery we make darker with a name."

Now, great popular religions, designed as they
are for the discipline and control of the great brute
masses of humanity, are almost entirely occupied
with morality, and what passes in them for
spirituality is merely mythology, an element of
picturesque supematuralism calculated to enforce

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90 THe Persecutions of Beauty

the morality with the multitude. Christianity-
is such a religion. It is mostly a matter of con-
duct here and now upon the earth. Its mystic
side does not property belong to it, and is foreign
to, not to speak of its being practically ignored by,
the average " Christian.** It is a religion designed
to work hand in hand with a given state of society,
making for the preservation of such laws and
manners and customs as are best fitted to make
that society a success here and now, a worldly
success in the best sense of the term. Moham-
medanism is a similar religion calculated for the
needs of a different society. Whatever the words
or intentions of the foimders of such religions,
their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They
are not mystic, or spiritual, or in anyway con-
cerned with infinite and eternal things. Their
business is the moral policing of humanity. Moral-
ity, as of course its name implies, is a mere matter
of custom,* and therefore varies with the variations
of races and climates. It has nothing to do with
spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often
the least spiritual, and vice versa. It will be
understood then that any force which is apt to
disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social,
order will meet at once with the opposition of
organized "religions" so called, and the more
spiritual it is, the greater will be the opposition,
for it will thus be the more dangerous.

Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily
the bugbear, more or less, of all religions, or, as I

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THe Persecutions of Beautx 9i

prefer to regard them, "organized moralities";
for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as
she is a purely spiritual force, with no relations to
man's little schemes of being good and making
money and being knighted and so forth. For
those who have eyes to see, she is the supreme
spiritual vision vouchsafed to us upon the earth —
and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger
to that materialistic use and wont by which a^one
a materialistic society remains possible. For
this reason our yoimg men and maidens — parti-
cularly our yoimg men — must be guarded against
her, for her beauty sets us adream, prevents our
doing our day's work, makes us forget the soulless
occupations in which we wither away our lives.
The man who loves beauty will never be mayor of
his city, or even sit on the Board of Aldermen.
Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain
of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a
woman he does not love. The face of beauty
makesallsuch achievements seem small and absurd.
Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest
forms of failure. In short. Beauty has made him
divinely discontented with the limited human
world about him, divinely incapable of taking it
seriously, or heeding its standards or conditions.
No wonder society should look upon Beauty as
dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its
equilibrium and playing havoq with its smooth
schemes and smug conventions. She outrages
the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature,"

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92 THe Persecutions of Beauty

and disintegrates "select" and ''exclusive" circles
with the wand of Romance. For earthly posses-
sions or rewards she has no heed. For her they
are meaningless things, mere idle dust and withered
leaves. Her only real estate is in the moon, and
the one article of her simple creed — "Love is
enough."

Love is enough: though the world be a- waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of com-
plaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark

wonder
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not

falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.

Those who have looked into her eyes see limit-
leos horizons undreamed of by those who know
her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant
adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time.
The world is so far right in regarding beauty with
a sort of superstitious dread, as a presence almost
uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a
daemonic thing, — which is what the world has
meant when it has, not unnaturally, confused it
with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a super-
natural stranger in our midst, a fairy element,

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THe Persecutions of Beauty 93

and, like the lorelei and the lamia, it does beckon
its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar
from ''all the uses of the world." Therefore, to
them also it brings the thrill of a different and
nobler fear — the thrill of the mortal in presence
of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny
seems to come over us as we first look into the
beautiful face we were born to love. It seems
veritably an apparition from another and lovelier
world, to which it summons us to go with it.
That is what we mean when we say that Love and
Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love,
is but one of the gates to that other world, a gate
to which we instinctively feel Love has the key.
That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories
of men who have come upon the white woman in
the woodland, and followed her, never to be seen
again of their fellows, or of those who, like Hylas,
have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring,
and sunk with her down into the crystal deeps.
The strange earth on which we live is just such
a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and
some of us have met that fair face, with a strange
suddenness of joy and fear, and followed and fol-
lowed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of
the world. But our failure was that we did not
follow that last white beckoning of the hand —

And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.

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VIII

THE MANY FACES — ^THE ONE DREAM

AMOP^G the many advantages of being v^ry
young is one's absolute certainty that there
is only one type of beautiful girl in the world.
That type we make a religion. We are its pugna-
cious champions, and the idea of our falling in
love with any other is too preposterous even for
discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blond-
ness, brunettes simply do not exist for us; and if
we affect the slim and willowy in figure, our con-
tempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere
for expression. Usually the type we choose is
one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to other
eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it
no justice, and that the man in the street — who,
strangely enough, we conceive as having no eye
for beauty — can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven,
she is not the type that any common eye can see.
Heads are not turned in her wake as she passes
along. Her beauty is not '* obvious." On the
contrary, it is of that rare and exquisite quality
which only a few favoured ones can apprehend —
like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we

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TKe Many Faces — ^TKe One Dream 95

have been chosen to be its high-priest and evan-
gelist. It is our secret, this beautiful fac^ that
we love, and we wonder how any one can be found
to love the other faces. We even pity them,
those rosy, rounded faces, with their bright un-
mysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled
chins. How fortunate for them that the secret
of the beauty we love has been hidden from their
lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor
less.

In fact, • the beauty we affect is aggressively
spiritual, and in so far as beauty is demonstrably
physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our ideal,
indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which
is beautiful in spite of the body rather than by
means of it; a beauty defiantly clothed, so to say,
in the dowdiest of fleshly garments — radiantly
independent of such carnal conditions as features
or complexion. Our ideal of figure might be said
to be negative rather than positive, and that ''little
sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring
us no disappointment.

We are often heard to say that beauty consists
chiefly, if not entirely, in expression, that it is a
transfiguration from within rather than a gracious
condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose
is no matter, and that a beautifully roimded chin
or a fine throat has nothing to do with it — ^indeed,
is rather in the way than otherwise. We point
to the fact — ^which is true enough — that the most
famous beauties of antiquity were plain women —

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96 THe Many Faces

plain, that is, according to the conventional
standards.

We also maintain — again with perfect truth —
that mystery is more than half of beauty, the ele-
ment of strangeness that stirs the senses through
the imagination. These and other perfectly true
truths about beauty we discover through our
devotion to the one face that we love — and we
should hardly have discovered them had we begun
with the merely cherry-ripe. It is with faces
much as it is with books. There is no way of
attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good
as to begin by mastering some difficult beautiful
classic, by devoting ourselves in the ardent re-
ceptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces
which will serve as touchstones for us in all our
subsequent reading. Some books engage all our
faculties for their appreciation, and through the
keen attentiveness we are compelled to give them
we make personal discovery of those principles
and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise
we might never have apprehended, or in which,
at all events, we should have been less securely
groimded.

So with faces : it is through the absorbed worship,
the jealous study, of one face that we best learn
to see the beauty in all the other faces — ^though the
mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty
could ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would
seem heresy indeed during the period of our dedica-
tion. The subtler the type, the more caviare it

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THe One Dream 97

is to the general, the more we leam from it. We
become in a sense discoverers, original thinkers,
of beauty, taking nothing on authority, but mak-
ing trial and investigation always for ourselves.
Such beauty brings us nearer than the more explicit
types to that mysterious threshold over which
beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us;
that well-spring of its wonder; the point where
first its shining essence pours its radiance into
the earthly vessel.

The perfect physical type hides no little of its
own miracle through its sheer perfection, as in the
case of those masterpieces which, as we say, con-
ceal their art. It is often through the face exter-
nally less perfect, faces, so to say, in process of
becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses of the
interior light in its divine operation. We seem
to look into the very alembic of beauty, and see
all the precious elements in the act of combina-
tion. No wonder we should deem these faces the
most beautiful of all, for through them we see, not
beauty made flesh, but beauty while it is still spirit.
In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot con-
ceive that there can be beauty in any other types
as well. Yet, because we chance to have fallen
under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no more
Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver
and faded stars, a wistful twilight beauty made of
sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half in the
shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We
cannot conceive how beauty, for others, can be a

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98 THe Many Faces

thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and orange
and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly
concrete, marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently
animal.

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles
softly to itself, but never speaks. How should we
tmderstand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a
beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and
brilliant ways, victoriously alive?

Perhaps it were well for us that we should never
tmderstand, well for us that we should preserve
our singleness of taste through life. Some con-
trive to do this, and never as long as they live are
unfaithful to the angel-blue eyes of their boyish
love. Moralists have perhaps not realized how
much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic
taste. Obviously the man who sees beauty only
in blue eyes is securer from temptation than the
man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes
as well; and how perilous is his state for whom
danger lurks in all beautiful eyes, irrespective of
shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is to this state
of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step
by the Mephistopheles of experience.

As great politicians in their maturity are usually
found in the exact opposite party to that which
they espoused in their youth, so men who loved
blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be
foimd at the feet of the raven-haired in their
middle age, and vice versa. The change is but a
part of that general change which overtakes us with

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THe One Dream 99

the years, substituting in us a catholic apprecia-
tion of the world as it is for idealist notions of the
world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a part
of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes
of the slow realization that other people are quite
as interesting as ourselves — ^in fact, a little more
so, — ^and their tastes and ways of looking at
things may be worth pondering, after all. But,
when we have arrived at this stage, what a
bewildering world of seductive new impressions
spreads for us its multitudinous snares! No
longer mere individuals, we have not merely an
individual's temptations to guard against, but
the temptations of all the world. Instead of being
able to see only that one type of beauty which
first appealed to us, our eyes have become so
instructed that we now see the beauty of all the
other types as well; and we no longer scorn as
Philistine the taste of the man in the street for
the beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly
contoured. Once we called it obvious. Now we
say it is '* barbaric," and call attention to its
perfection of type.

The remembrance of our former injustice to it
may even awaken a certain tenderness towards it
in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making
love to it, partly fron a vague desire to make
reparation to a slighted type, and partly from the
experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the at-
traction of which it was once impossible for us to
imagine. So we feel when the charm of some old

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lOO TKe Many Faces

master, hitherto unsympathetic, is sudd^ily re-
vealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How
blind they must have thought us!

, Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that
I once looked into blue eyes as I am looking now
into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you forgive
these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of
rippled- gold? Ah! they did not know. It was
in ignorance they sinned. They did not know.

O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the
garden of the world, forgive me that once I gave
to the little shrub-like women the worship that is
rightly yours!

Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vine-
yard heavy with golden grapes, abimdant as an or-
chard of apple blossoms, forgive that once I loved
the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beau-
ty, the silvery imcorseted phantoms of womanhood.
It was in ignorance I sinned. I did not know.

Ah ! That Mephistopheles of experience ! How
he has led us from one fair face to another, teach-
ing us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer
lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one
lovely face, there is now no type whose secret is
hidden from us. The world has become a garden
of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but
they are all beautiful. How is it possible for us,
now that we know the charm of each one, to be
indiiTerent to any, or to set the beauty of one above
the other? We have learned the beauty of the
orchid, but surely we have not imleamed the rose;

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THe One Dream loi

and would you say that orchid or rose is more
beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are
differently beautiful, that is all.

Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I
thought so once, but now I see that they are differ-
ently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair more
beautiful than black any more, or black than gold.
They are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is
thy white skin, O Saxon lady, more beautiful than
hers of tropic bronze.

Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful
faces ; come Kke stars in dreams, or come vivid as
fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid fawn,
or terrible as an army with banners; come silent,
come singing . . . you are all beautiful, and none
is fairer than another — only differently fair.

And yet . . . and yet . . . Experience is in-
deed Mephistopheles in this: We must pay him for
all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our
souls? I wonder.

This at least is true: that, while indeed he has
opened our eyes tp all this beauty that was hidden
to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we could
see but evil before, we miss something from our
delight in these faces. We can appreciate more
beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as much
as in those old days when we were such passionate
monoth^ists of the beautiful? Alas! We are
priests no more, are we even lovers? But we
are wonderful connoisseurs.

It is our souls.

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THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR

MAIS Oil sont les neiges d'antan? As I tran-
scribe once more that ancient sigh, perhaps
the most real sigh in all literature, it is high mid-
summer, and the woodland surroimding the little
cabin in which I am writing lies in a trance of
green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy with
the whirring of cicadae, imder the might of the
July Sim. Bees buzz in and out through my door,
and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters a while
about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again,
in search of sweets more to his taste than those of
the muses! though Catullus is there, with

Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down,
Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sangV

As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the
hot murmuring afternoon, and my eyes rest on
the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the
lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so
spendthrift in their crowding luxuriance, I try to
imagine the ground as it was but four months ago
still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade
: : : : : 102

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THe Snoi^s of Yester-Year 103

of grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf,
seemed like a miracle, and it was impossible to real-
ize that under the broad snowdrifts a million seeds,
like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their
painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was
plentiful then, to be had by the ton — but now,
the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home
with new illuminating force Villon's old refrain,
that though I sought the woodland from end to
end, ransacked its most secret places, not one
vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty,
would it be possible to find. Though you were
to offer me a million dollars for as much as would
fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred
million, I should have to see all that money pass
me by. I can think of hardly anything that it
couldn't buy — but such a simple thing as last
year's snow!

Could there be 5^^more poi^ant sjfmbol of irre-
claimable vami^ed thing^/man/mat so happily
hit on by ^h^ld balla^e4naker:

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year.

Save with thus much for an overword —
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness
for asking these sad, hopeless questions of snow
and wind. He muses. not only of the drift of fair
faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all

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I04 THe SnoiTirs of Yester-Year 1^^ —

the arrogant pride and pomp of the earth^" pur-
suivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey ! " ' * Ah ! where
is the doughty Charlemagne? " They, even as the
humblest, '*the wind has carried them all away."
'T'hey have vanished utterly as the sno\^^one —
who knows where? — on the wind^/l^*iJ^ad and
gone' — a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life," as
Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his Death's Jest
Book. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-
echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade;

Through the mad world's scene

We are drifting on,
To this tune, I ween,

'*They are dead and gone!"

'Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an
old poet, and, while the melancholy of the exercise
is undouted, there is at the same time an unde-
niable charm attaching to those moods of imagina-
^/ tive retrospect in which we summon up shapes and
happenings of the vanished past, a tragic charm
indeed similar to that we experience in mournful
music or elegiac poetry.

. iPots^ it is impossible to turn our eyes on any
point of the starlit vista of human history, without
being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense of
the immense treasure of radiant human lives that
has gone to its making, the innumerable dramatic
careers now shrimk to a mere mention, the divinely
passionate destinies, once all wild dream and

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The Snoiws of Yester-Year 105

dancing blood, now nought but a name huddled
with a thousand such in some dusty index, seldom
turned to even by the scholar, and as imknown to
the world at large as the moss-grown name on
some sunken headstone in a country churchyard.
What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift
universe it seems, pouring out its multitudinous
generations of men and women^pvith the same
wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with
millions of exquisite lives, marvellously devised,
patterned with inexhaustible fancy, mysteriously
furnished with subtle organs after their needs,
crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with
magic seeds,— :such a vast treasure of fragrant
sunlit leafag«^mll produced with such elaborate
care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish
utterly away!

Along with this crushing sense of cosmic pro-
digality, and somewhat lighting up its melancholy,
comes the inspiring realization of the splendid
spectacle of himian achievement, the bewilder-
ing array of all the glorious lives that have been
Kved, of all the glorious happenings, under the sim.
Ah! what men this world has seen, and — what
women! What divine actors have trod this old
stage, and in what tremendous dramas have they
taken part! And how strange it is, reading some
great dramatic career, of Caesar, say, or Luther,
or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize that there was
a time when they were not, then a time when they
were beginning to be strange new names in men's

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io6 The Sno-ws of Yester-Year

ears, then all the romantic excitement of their
developing destinies, and the thunder and light-
ning of the great resounding moments of their
lives — ^moments made out of real, actual, prosaic
time, just as our own moments are made, yet once
so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as
though to stay there forever, moments so glorious
that it would seem that Time must have paused
to watch and prolong them, jealous that they
should ever pass and give place to lesser moments!
Think too of those other fateful moments of
history, moments not confined to a few godlike in-
dividuals, but participated in by whole nations,
such moments as that of the great Armada, the
French Revolution, or the Declaration of American
Independence. How strangely it comes upon one
that these past happenings were once only just tak-
ing place, just as at the moment of my writing other
things are taking place, and clocks were ticking and
water flowing, just as they are doing now! How
wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then,
as we are alive now, to have shared in those vast
national enthusiasms, '*in those great deeds to
have had some little part" ; and is it not a sort of
poor anti-climax for a world that has gone through
such noble excitement to have sunk back to this
level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like
moments of human exaltation — what are they
now, but, so to say, the pumice-stone of history.
They have passed as the summer flowers are
passing, they are gone with last year's snow.

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The Sno^ws of Yester-Year 107

But the last year's snow of our personal lives — . ^' 1 "
what a wistful business it is, when we get thinking \
of that! To recall certain magic moments out of
the past is to run a risk of making the happiest
present seem like a desert; and for most men, I
imagine, such retrospect is usually busied with ' .^
some fair face, or perhaps — being men — with
several fair faces, once so near and dear, and now
so far. How poignantly and unprofitably real^
memory can make them — all but bring them
back — ^how vividly reconstruct immortal occasions
of happiness that we^aid could not, must not,
pass away; while all the time our heaSfts were
aching with the sure knowledge that they were
even then, as we wildly clutched at them, slipping
from our grasp!

That summer afternoon, — do you too still
remember it, Miranda? — when, under the whisper-
ing woodland, we ate our lunch together with such
prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter,
yet never took our eyes from each other; and,
when the meal was ended, how we wandered
along the stream-side down the rocky glen, till
we came to an enchanted pool among the boulders,
all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging ^

boughs-ijj^o you remember what happened then, (jUiX^
Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest pools, it is
no use asking me to forget. / '

And, all the time, my heart was saying to my
eyes: — "This fairy hour — so real, so magical, now
— some day will be in the far past; you will sit

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io8 The Snoiws of Yester-Year

right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall
it only with the anguish of beautiful vanished
things." And here I am today surely enough,
years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!

I suppose that the river, this summer day, is
making the same music along its rocky bed, and
the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted
pool just the same as when — but where are the
laughing ripples — ^ah! Miranda — ^that broke with
laughter over the divinely troubled water, and
the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies,
that rocked to and fro in a panic of dazzling
alabaster?

They are with last year's snow.

Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and
the laughter of a chil(^and soul like the starlit
^^jjr sky, where should one look for the snows of yester-
year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall
never see SLgainyt Wherever you are, lost to me
somewhere among the winding paths of this
strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the
moonlight falls over the sea, give a thought to
that night when we sat together by a window
overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit
pearl, and, dimly seen near shore, a boat was
floating, like some mystic barge, as we said, in
our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the
Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon? -Ah !
how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat
was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps
it was that we seemed to be already there, as you

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The Sno-ws of Yester-Year 109

turned and placed your hand in mine and said:

" My life is in your hand." And we both believed

it true. yVes! wherever we went together in those

days, we were always in that enchanted land — /^ ^Ui^

whether we rode side by side through London ^^*^

/ streets in a hansom — **a two- wheeled heaven"
. y we called it — (for our dream stretches as far back
as that prehistoric day — How old one of us seems
to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow
old) — or sat and laughed at clowns in London music
halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed at
each other, as if our hearts would break for joy,
over the snow-white napery of some country inn,
and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we
drank his red wine to the immortality of our love.

^^'erhaps we were right, after all. Perhaps it
could never die, and Time and Distance are
perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have
never been apart. Who knows but that you are
looking over my shoulder as I write, though you
seem so far away, lost in that starlit silence that
you loved. ^Aht Mieriel, is it well with you, this
suirnner-xisy? A sigh seems to pass through the
sunlit grasses. They are waving and whispering
as I have seen them waving and whispering over
graves.

Such moments as these I have recalled all
men have had in their lives, moments when
life seemed to have come to miraculous flower,
attained that perfect fulfilment of its prom-
ise which else we find only in dreams. /Be- QJ^C

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no THe Sno-ws of Yester-Year

yond doubt there is something in the flawless
blessedness of such moments that links our mor-
tality with super-terrestrial states of being. We
do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into
the ether of eternal existences, and, for the brief
hour, live as they, drinking deep of that music of
the infinite which is the divine food of the en-
franchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation,
and our wild longing to hold the moment for ever;
for, while it is with us, we have literally escaped
from the everyday earth, and have foimd the way
itito some other dimension of being, and its passing
means our sad return to the prison-house of Time,
the place of meetings and partings, of distance
and death.

Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a
remorseful sense that perhaps we might have held
them fast, after all. If only we might bring them
back, surely we would find some way to dwell in
them for ever. They came upon us so suddenly
out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we
were so bewildered with the wonder of their com-
ing that we stretched out our hands to seize them,
only when they were already spreading their wings
for flight. But if the divine bird would but
visit us again ! What golden nets we would spread
for him ! What a golden cage of worship we would
make ready! Our eyes would never leave his
strange plumage, nor would we miss one note of his
strange song. But alas! now that we are grown
wise and watchful, that ''moment eternal" comes

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THe Sno-ws of Yester-Year in

to us no more. Perhaps too that sad wisdom
which has come to us with the years would least
of all avail us, should such moments by some
magic chance suddenly return. For it is one of
the dangers of the retrospective habit that it
incapacitates us for the realization of the present
hour. Much dwelling on last year's snow will
make us forget the simimer flowers. Dreaming^
of fair faces that are gone, we will look with un-
seeing eyes into the fair faces that companion us
still. To the Spring we say: *'What of all your
blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already
at your heels, like a shiadow; and Winter waits
for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that
still may beckon we say: **Well, what though you
be fulfilled, you will pass, like the rest. I shall
see you come. We shall dwell together for a while,
and then you will go; and all will be as it was be-
fore, all as if you had never come at all." For the
retrospective mood, of necessity, begets the antici-
patory; we see everything finished before it is
begun, and welcome and valediction blend to-
gether on our lips. ''That which hath been is
now; and that which is to be hathj already been."

In every kiss sealed fast
To feel the first kiss and forebode the last —

that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and
sicklies o'er every action of him whom life has
thus taught to look before and after.

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11^

THe Sno*W8 of Yester-Year

ddr

Youth is not like that, and therein, for older
eyes, lies its tragic pathos. Superficial — or, if
you prefer it, more normal — observers are made
happy by the spectacle of eager and confident
young lives, all abloom and adream, turning
towards the future with plumed impatient feet.
But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad
as young joy. The playing of children is perhaps
the most unbearably sad thing in the world. Who
can look on young lovers, without tears in their
eyes? With what innocent faith they are taking
in all the radiant lies of life! But perhaps a young
mother with her new-bom babe on her breast is the
most tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy,
for none of all the trusting sons and daughters of
men is destined in the end to find herself so tra-
gically, one might say cynically, fooled.

Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one
ponders the lavish heartless use life seems to
make of all its divinely precious material — were it
but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies
of a single summer day — ^it does seem as though a
cruel cynicism inhered somewhere in the scheme
of things, delighting to destroy and disillusionize,
to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the
winds, and, inspire joy in order to mock it with
desolation, j^ometimes it seems as though the
mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the
vessels it has called into being, hardly treats
them fairly, uses them with an ignoble disdain.
For, how generously we give ourselves up to life,

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THe Snoiws of Yester-Year 113

how innocently we put our trust in it, do its
bidding with such fine ardours, striving after
beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and clean
of heart — ^yet ''what hath maiVof all his labours,
and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he''
hath laboured under the sun." Yea, dust, and^^^-o
fallen rose-leaves, and last y^^-^'s snow. ^^*-

-'^And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishon- /
oured decay of things, that retrospective mood of I
ours will sometimes take another turn, and, soj
rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure \
that it has lost, and yet in imagination still holds, 1
that it will not resign itself to mortal thoughts j
of such manifest immortalities. ^The snows of
yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have
so utterly vanished as they seem. Who can say
but that there may be somewhere in the imiverse
secret treasuries where all that has ever been
precious is precious still, safely garnered and
guarded for us against some wonderful moment
which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring
apocalypse all the wonderful moments that have
but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as no-
thing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter,
nothing is lost too in the world of love and
dream.

vanished loveliness of flowers and faces.
Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes,
Are there for these no safe and secret places?
And is it true that beauty never dies?

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114 THe Sno-ws of Yester-Year

Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names,
Women who set the whole wide world in flames,
Poets who sang their passion to the skies,
And lovers wild and wise:

Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam
Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream?
Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath ?
And is there no sure thing in life — but death?

Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely
things when we come at length to the Land of
Last Year's Snow.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP

ACCORDING to the old Scandinavian fable
of the cosmos, the whole world is encircled
in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name
for it was the Midgard serpent, and doubtless,
for the old myth-maker, it had another signifi-
cance. Today, however, the symbol may still
hold good of a certain terrible and hideous reality.
Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils
of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is
Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear
its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and
sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness,
myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying
carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed
infamy endangering whole nations and even
races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic
wrigglers that multiply, a million a minute, in the
covered cesspools of private life.

Printed history is so infested with this vermin,
in the form of secret memoirs, back-stairs diarists,
and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is almost
impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any

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ii6 THe PsxcHolo^x of Gossip

history whatsoever. The fame of great person-
ages may be literally compared to the heroic
figures in the well-known group of the Laocoon,
battling in vain with the strangling coils of the
sea-serpent of Poseidon. We scarcely know what
to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not
true, as Tennyson puts it, that **each man walks
with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies"?

What is this evil leaven that seems to have been
mixed in with man's clay at the very beginning,
making one almost ready to believe in the old
Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating
through nature, everywhere doiiig battle with the
good? Even from the courts of heaven, as we
learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not
excluded; and how eternally true to the methods
of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way of going
to work in that immortal allegory! Let us re-
call the famihar scene with a quoted verse or
two:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came
to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan
[otherwise, the Adversary] came also among them.

And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest
thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said:
*' From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking
up and down in it.'*

And the Lord said unto Satan: *'Hast thou con-
sidered my servant Job, that there is none like him
in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that
feareth God, and escheweth evil? "

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THe Psycholo|(y of Gossip 117

Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, **Doth
Job fear God for nought?"

Here we have in a nutshell the whole modus
operandi of the gossip in all ages, and as he may
be observed at any hour of the day or night, slimily
engaged in his cowardly business. ''Going to and
fro in the earth, walking up and down in it,"
everywhere peering and listening, smiling and
shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing
a seed, leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only
implying; leaving everywhere trails of slime, yet
trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure
in his very cowardice.

''Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only
asks, observe. Affirms nothing. Only innocently
wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all — and leaves
it to work.

The victim may possibly be set right in the end,
as was Job ; but meanwhile he has lost his flocks and
his herds, his sons and his daughters, and suffered
no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague
of boils. Actually — life not being, like the Book
of Job, an allegory — he very seldom is set right,
but must bear his losses and his boils with what
philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter.

The race to which Job belonged presents per-
haps the most conspicuous example of a whole
people burdened throughout its history with a
heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of
Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as

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ii8 The P8xcHolo|(x of Gossip

one of its show places, the famous ''Jew's House,"
associated with the gruesome lesend of "the boy
of Lincoln" — a, child, it was whispered, sacrificed
by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts. Such
a wild belief in. child-sacrifice by the Jews was
widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely
responsible, I understand, even at the present day,
for the Jewish massacres in Russia.

Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful
thought into the mind of Europe! Think of the
holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant
agony of which his diabolical invention has been
the cause! What criminal in history compares
in infamy with that unknown — ^gossip?

A similar madness of superstition, responsible
for a like cruel sacrifice of innocent lives, was the
terrible belief in witchcraft. Having its origin
in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation
of hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with
the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delight-
ing in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage
of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal
enmity. At any time to a period as near to our
own day as the early eighteenth century, nothing
was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by
starting a whisper going that he or she held secret
commerce with evil spirits, was a reader of magical
books, and could at will cast spells of disease and
death upon the neighbours or their cattle.

You had but to be recluse in your habits and
eccentric in your appearance, with perhaps a

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THe PsxcHolo^x of Gossip 119

little more wisdom in yoiir head and your conver-
sation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the
first fool or knave who could gather a mob at his
heels, and hale you to the nearest horse-pond.
Statement and proof were one, and how ready,
and indeed eager, human nature was to believe
the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or im-
scrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the
famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men
high in the state, as well as helpless old women
in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or
incriminating beards on their withered faces, were
equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons
ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the
malignant gossip.

In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly
that, whatever individuals are originally respon-
sible, society at large is all too culpably particeps
criminis in this phenomenon under consideration.
If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear
it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip.
Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of
slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to
receive it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it
in crops persistent as the wild carrot and flam-
boyant as the wild mustard.

There is something mean in human nature that
prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and
a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of
goodness and greatness and things of good report.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe

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I20 XHe PsycHology of Gossip

the worst of one another. In all times it has been
in this field of inter-racial and international pre-
judice that the gossip has found the widest scope
for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissen-
sions and mistmderstandings which have per-
sisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause
of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous
growths which the enlightenment of the world
painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps
never entirely eradicate.

Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the
heritage of ancient gossip. Think of the genera-
tions of ill-feeling that kept England and France,
though divided but by a narrow strait, ''natural
enemies" and misunderstood monsters to each
other. In a less degree, the friendship of England
and America has been retarded by international
gossips on both sides. And as for races and nations
more widely separated by distance or customs, no
lies have been bad enough for them to believe
about one another.

It is only of late years that Europe has come
to regard the peoples of the Orient as htunan be-
ings at all. And all this mistmderstanding has
largely been the work of gossip acting upon
ignorance.

It is easy to see how in the days of difficult
communication, before nations were able to get
about in really representative numbers to make
mutual acquaintance, they were completely at
the mercy of a few irresponsible travellers, who

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THe PsycHology of Gossip 121

said or wrote what they pleased, and had no com-
punction about lying in the interests of enter-
tainment. The proverbial *' gaiety of nations"
has always, in a great degree, consisted in each
nation believing that it was superior to all others,
and that the natives of other cotmtries were in-
variably hopelessly dirty and immoral, to say the
least. Such reports the traveller was expected to
bring home with him, and such he seldom failed
to bring.

Even at the present time, when intercourse is so
cosmopolitan, and some approach to a sense of
htmian brotherhood has been arrived at, the old
misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to
be constantly on their guard in believing all that
the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them
about other countries. Electricity, many as are
its advantages for cosmopolitan rapprochements ^
is not invariably employed in the interests of truth,
and newspaper correspondents, if not watched,
are liable to be an even more dangerous form of
international gossip than the more leisurely
fabulist of ancient time.

When we come to consider the operation of
gossip in the lives of individuals, the disposition
of himian nature to relish discrediting rumour is
pitifully conspicuous. We know Hamlet's opin-
ion on the matter:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,

The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

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122 .THe PsycHology of Gossip

And again:

Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
Thou shalt not escape calumny.

This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth,
for mankind, while it admires both greatness and
goodness, would seem to resent the one and only
half believe in the other. At all events, nothing
is more to its taste than the rtmiour that detracts
from the great or sullies the good; and so long as
the rimiour be entertaining, it has little concern
for its truth.

Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say
admirably to our purpose:

In ages which we call heroic, the saint works mira-
cles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength
of natural man. In ages less visionary, which are given
to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a
great man down to the common level, and to discover
or invent faults which shall show that he is or was
but a little man after all. Our vanity is soothed by
evidence that those who have eclipsed us in the
race of life are no better than ourselves, or in some
respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general
impulses be added political or personal animosity,
accusations of depravity are circulated as surely
about such men, and are credited as readily as under
other influences are the marvellous achievements of
a Cid or a St. Francis.

The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as
the absurdity of a miracle; the ground for belief may

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THe PsycHolo^y of Gossip 123

be no more than a lightness of mind, and a less par-
donable wish that it may be true. But the idle tale
floats in society, and by and by is written down in
books and passes into the region of established
realities.

The proportion of such idle tales seriously
printed as history can never, of course, be com-
puted. Sometimes one is tempted to think that
history is mainly ** whole cloth." Certainly the
lives of such men as Caesar are largely made up of
what one might term illustrative fictions rather
than actual facts. The story of- Caesar and Cleo-
patra is probably such an '* illustrative fiction,"
representing something that might very well have
happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not.
At all events, it does his fame no great harm, im-
like another caltunny, which, as it does not seem
"illustrative" — that is, not in keeping with his
general character — ^we are at liberty to reject.
Both alike, however, were the product of the gossip,
the embodied littleness of human nature endeav-
ouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit
the strong man, who, whatever his actual fatdts,
at least strenuously shoulders for his fellows the
hard work of the world.

The great have usually been strong enough to
smile contempt on their traducers — Caesar's an-
swer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus
was to ask him to dinner — ^but even so, at what
extra cost, what ''expense of spirit in a waste of

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124 THe PsycKolo^y of Gossip

shame," have their achievements been bought,
because of these curs that bark forever at the
heels of fame!

And not always have they thus prevailed against
the pack. Too often has the sorry spectacle been
seen of greatness and goodness going down before
the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even
Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul
perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-
wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the
poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so
much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of the
gossips of Athens.

In later times, no service to his country, no
greatness of character, can save the noble Raleigh
from the tongues determined to bring him to the
block; and, when the haughty head of Marie An-
toinette must bow at last upon the scaffold, the
true guillotine was the guillotine of gossip. It
was such lying tales as that of the diamond
necklace that had brought her there. All
Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her
from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's
genius protect his name from the foulest of
stains.

In oiir own time, the mere mention of the name
of Drejrfus suffices to remind us of the terrible
nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the
last year or two, have we not seen the loved king
of a great nation driven to seek protection from
the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law? But

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THe PsycHology of Gossip 125

gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that
where once it has affixed its foul stain, thie mark
remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain
which not all the multitudinous seas could wash
from the little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more
the stain is washed, the more persistently it re-
appears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holy-
rood Palace., To deny a rumour is but to spread
it. An action for libel, however it may be decided,
has at least the one inevitable result of perpetu-
ating it.

Take the historical case of the Man with the
Iron Mask. Out of pure deviltry, it would appear,
Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction as one
of his written romances, that the mysterious
prisoner Was no less than a half-brother of Louis
XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic possibili-
ties of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Never, probably, was
so impudent an invention, and surely never one
so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose
it over and over again. Learned editors have
• proved with no shadow of a doubt that the real
man of the mask was an obscure Italian political
adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced,
the world will have nothing of your Cotmt Mat-
thioli, and will probably go on believing Voltaire's
story to the end of time.

'*At least there must have been something in
it" is always the last word on such debatable
matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever

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126 THe PsycHology of Gossip

a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the
victim, but always the scandal, to which the
benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever
the proven fact, the world always prefers to hold
fast by the disreputable doubt.

All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad
name. The world will see that he never loses it.
In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of the
dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most
pathetic of illusions. ''Posterity will see me
righted," cries some poor victim of human wrong,
as he goes down into the darkness; but of all
appeals, the appeal to posterity is the most
hopeless.

What posterity relishes is rather new scandals
about its immortals than tiresome belated justi-
fications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker
with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and
frailty in its immortal exemplars. For rehabili-
tation it has neither time nor inclination, and it
pursues certain luckless reputations beydnd the
grave with a mysterious malignity.

Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe.
One would have thought that posterity would
be eager to make up to his shade for the
criminal animus of Rufus Griswold, his first bio-
grapher. On the contrary, it prefers to perpetuate
the lying portrait; and no consideration of the
bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles
with adverse conditions, no editorial advocacy, or
documentary evidence in his favour, has persuaded

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TKe PsycKolo^y of Gossip 127

posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of
his fatuous contemporaries.

Portimately, it all matters nothing to Poe now.
It is only to us that it matters.

Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to
realize that the humanity of which we are a part
is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and
so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such
conditions, it is surprising that greatness and good-
ness are ever found willing to serve himianity at
all, and that any but scoimdrels can be fotmd to
dare the risks of the high places of the world.
For this social disease of gossip resembles that
distemper which, at the present moment, threatens
the chestnut forests of ^America. It first attacks
the noblest trees. Like it, too, it would seem to
baffle all remedies, and like it, it would seem to be
the work of indestructible microscopic worms.

It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip
that makes his detection so difficult, and gives him
his security. A great reputation may feel itwself
worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a
crash, but it will look around in vain for the social
vermin that have brought about its fall. It is
the cowardice of gossip that its victims have
seldom an opportunity of coming face to face
with their destroyers; for the gossip is as small
as he is ubiquitous —

Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid.

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128 THe PsycHolo^y of Gossip

In all societies, there are men and women who
are vaguely known as gossips; but they are seldom
caught red-handed. For one thing, they do not
often speak at first hand. They profess only to
repeat something that they have heard — some-
thing, they are careful to add, which is probably
quite untrue, and which they themselves do not
believe for a moment.

Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no
concern of ours. It is not for us to sift its truth,
or to bring it to the attention of the individual it
tarnishes. Obviously, society would become alto-
gether impossible if each one of us were to con-
stitute ourselves a sort of social police to arraign
every accuser before the accused. We should
thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse,
and involimtarily play the gossip's own game.
The best we can do is as far as possible to banish
the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to
keep our own mouths shut.

Even so, however, some harm will have been
done. We shall never be quite sure but that the
rumour was true, and when we next meet the
person concerned, it will probably in some degree
colour our attitude toward him.

And with others, less high-minded than our-
selves, the gossip will have had greater success.
Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will
inquire of someone else if what So-and-so hinted
of So-and-so can possibly be true. And so it will
go on ad infinitum. The formula is simple, and

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The Psychology of Gossip 129

it is only a matter of arithmetical progression for
a private lie, once started on its journey, to become
a public scandal, with a reputation gone, and no
one visibly responsible.

Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful
in its intention. The deliberate, creative gossip
is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually represents
the need of a bored world to be entertained at
any price, the restless ennui that ftiust be forever
talking or listening to fill the vacuity of its exist-
ence, to supply its lack of really vital interests.
This demand naturally creates a supply of idle
talkers, whose social existence depends on their
ability to provide the entertainment desired; and
nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the
idle human ear as the whisper that discredits, or
the story that ridicules, the distinction it envies,
and the goodness it cannot understand.

The mystery of gossip is bound up with the
mysterious human need of talking. Talk we must,
though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer
lack of subject-matter. When we know why man
talks so much, apparently for the mere sake of
talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing
why he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than
good of his fellows.

Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to
speak well of his victims, to circulate stories to
their credit rather than the reverse, but for the
melancholy fact that he would thus be left without
an audience. For the world has no anxiety to

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I30 THe PsycHology of Gossip

hear good of its neighbour, and there is no piquancy
in the disclosure of hidden virtues.

'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the
only poor consolation to be got out of it is that
the victims of gossip may, if they feel so inclined,
feel flattered rather than angered by its attentions ;
for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts
and qualities transcending the common. At least
it presupposes individuality; and, all things con-
sidered, it may be held as true that those most
gossiped about are usually those who can best
afford to pay this tax levied by society on any
form of distinction.

After all, the great and good man has his great-
ness and goodness to support him, though the
world should unite in depreciating him. The
artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has
her beauty. 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus
and thus; and if fame must have gossip for its
seamy side, there are some satisfactions that
cannot be stolen away, and some laurels that
defy the worm.

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THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR

THE word "editor" as applied to the conductors
of magazines and newspapers is rapidly be-
coming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and
functions formerly exercised by editors, properly
so called, are being more and more usurped by the
capitalist proprietor. There are not a few maga-
zines where the ''editor" has hardly more say in
the acceptance of a manuscript than the contri-
butor who sends it in. Few are the editors left
who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with
which the name of editor was wont to be invested.
These survive owing chiefly to the prestige of
long service, and even they are not always free
from the encroachments of the new method. The
proprietor still feels the irksome necessity of treat-
ing their editorial policies with respect, though
secretly chafing for the moment when they shall
give place to more manageable, modem tools.

The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than
a clerk doing the bidding of his proprietor, and
the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to
truckle to the public taste — or rather to his crude

131

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132 THe Passing Aiway of iHe Editor

conception of the public taste. The only real
editors of today are the capitalist and the public.
The nominal editor is merely an oflSce-boy of
larger growth, and slightly larger salary.

Innocent sotils still, of course, imagine him
clothed with divine powers, and letters of intro-
duction to him are still sought after by the super-
stitious beginner. Alas ! the chances are that the
better he thinks of your MS. the less likely is it
to be accepted by — the proprietor; for Mr. Snooks,
the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and
a peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring
of the "literary." His broad editorial axiom is
that a poptilar magazine should be everything
and anything but — "literature." For any signs
of the literary taint he keeps open a stem and ever-
watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial
assistant" — to make a distinction without a differ-
ence — whom he should suspect of literary leanings
has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is seldom
much of a reader himself. His activities have
been exclusively financial, and he has drifted into
the magazine business as he might have drifted
into pork or theatres — ^from purely financial rea-
sons. His literary needs are botmded on the
north by a detective story, and on the south by a
scientific article. The old masters of literature
are as much foolishness to him as the old masters
of painting. In short, he is just a common, igno-
rant man with money invested in a magazine; and
who shall blame him if he goes on the principle

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THe Passing Arweky of iHe Editor I33

that he who pays the piper calls the ttine. When
he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrust-
ing his magazine to some young man with real
editorial ability and ambition to make a really
good thing. This yotmg man gathers about him
a group of kindred spirits, and the result is that
after the publication of the second number Mr.
Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with
the aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His
bright young men hadn't tmderstood **what the
public wants'* at all. They were too high-toned,
too "literary." What the public wants is short
stories and pictures of actresses; and the short
stories, like the actresses, must be no better than
they should be. Even short stories when they
are masterpieces are not "what the public wants."
So the bright yotmg men go into outer darkness,
sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third
number Snooks* s Monthly has fallen into line with
the indistinguishable ruck of monthly magazines,
only indeed distinguishable one from the other by
the euphonious names of their proprietors.

Now, a proprietor's right to have his property
managed according to his own ideas needs no
emphasizing. The sad thing is that such pro-
prietors shotild get hold of such property. It all
comes, of course, of the modem vulgarization of
wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was
aristocratic, and its possession, more or less im-
plied in its possessors the possession, too, of refine-
ment and ctdture. The rich men of the past

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134 The Passing Away of the Editor

knew enough to encotirage and support the finer
arts of life, and were interested in maintaining
high standards of public taste and feeling. Thus
they were capable of sparing some of their wealth
for investment in objects which brought them a
finer kind of reward than the financial. Among
other things, they understood and respected the
dignity of literature, and would not have expected
an editor to nm a literary venture in the interests
of the illiterate. The further degradation of the
public taste was not then the avowed object of
popular magazines. Indeed — strange as it soimds
nowadays — ^it was rather the education than the
degradation of the pubUc taste at which the editor
aimed, and in that aim he fotmd the support of
intelligent proprietors.

Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth
has become democratic, and it is only here and
there, in its traditional possessors, that it retains
its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the com-
monest man can be a multi-millionaire, so the
commonest man can own a magazine, and have it
edited in the commonest fashion for the common
good.

As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true
sense, will soon be gone. There is, need one say,
no lack today of men with real editorial individ-
uality — but editorial individuality is the last
thing the capitalist proprietors want. It is just
that they are determined to stamp out. Therefore,
your real editor must either swallow his pride and

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The Passing Away of the Editor 135

submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the
little band of automatic sorters of manuscript,
which, as nine tailors make a man, nowadays
constitute a sort of composite editor under the
direction of the proprietor.

With the elimination of editorial individuality
necessarily follows elimination of individuality
in the magazine. More and more, every day,
magazines are conforming to the same monotonous
type; so that, except for name and cover, it is
impossible to tell one magazine from another.
Happily one or two — rari nantes in gurgito vasto —
survive amid the democratic welter; and all who
have at heart not only the interests of literature,
but the true interests of the public taste, will pray
that they will have the courage to maintain their
distinction, unseduced by the moneyed voice of
the mob — o. distinction to which, after all, they
have owed, and will continue to owe, their success.
The names of these magazines will readily occur
to the reader, and, as they occur, he cannot but
reflect that it was just editorial individuality and
a high standard of policy that made them what
they are, and what, it is ardently to be hoped,
they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos
are the worst possible editors for a magazine ; and
in the end, even, it is the best magazine that
always makes the most money.

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XII

THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN

I OFTEN think, as I sit here in my green office
in the woodland — ^too often diverted from
some serious literary business with the moon
or the morning stars, or a red squirrel who is
the famihar spirit of my wood-pile, or having
my thoughts carried out to sea by the river
which runs so freshly and so truantly, with so
strong a current of temptation, a hundred yards
away from my window — I often think that the
strong necessity that compelled me to do my
work, to ply my pen and inkpot out here in the
leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it
by typewriter in some forty-two-storey building
in the city, is one of those encouraging signs
of the times which links one with the great
brotherhood of men and women that have
heard the call of the great god Pan, as he sits
by the river —

Sweet, sweet, sweet, Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
136

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TKe Spirit of tKe Open 137

And I go on thinking to this effect: that this
impulse that has come to so many of us, and has,
incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our lives,
is something more than duck-shooting, trout-
fishing, butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental
passion for sunsets, but is indeed something not so
very far removed from religion, romantic religion.
At all events, it is something that makes us happy,
and keeps us straight. That combination of
results can only come by the satisfaction of the
undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an in-
stinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness
too. Now, there are creeds by which you can be
good without being happy; and creeds by which
you can be happy without being good. But, per-
haps, there is only one creed by which you can be
both at once — the creed of the growing grass, and
the blue sky and the running river, the creed of
the dog-wood and the skunk-cabbage, the creed
of the red-wing and the blue heron — the creed of
the great god Pan.

Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might
well, in an age eager for novelty, expect to be the
latest fashion; but the revival of his worship is
something far more than a mere vogue. It was
rumoured, as, of course, we all know, early in the
Christian era, that he was dead. The pilot
Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch,
sailing near Pascos, with a boatful of merchants,
heard in the twilight a mighty voice calling from
the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world

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138 TKe Spirit of tKe Open

that Pan was dead. '* Pan is dead ! " — three times
ran the strange shuddering cry through the dark-
ness, as though the very earth itself wailed the
passing of the god.

But Pan, of course, could only die with the
earth itself, and so long as the lichen and the moss
keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder,
and the hghtning zigzags down through the hem-
locks, and the arrowhead guards its waxen blossom
in the streams; so long as the earth shakes with
the thimder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the
song of the veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in
the wild rose, so long will there be little chapels
to Pan in the woodland — chapels on the lintels of
which you shall read, as Virgil wrote: Happy is he
who knows the rural gods, Pan, and old Sylvanus,
and the sister nymphs.

It is strange to see how in every country, but
more particularly in America and in England, the
modem man is finding his religion as it was found
by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery
of the visible universe, those who first caught
ghmpses of

Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain,
Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.

First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all
events, they are the bravest. And man's first
thoughts of the world and the strangely romantic
life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to

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TKe Spirit of tKe Open 139

live, unconsiilted, iininstructed, left to feel his way
in the blinding radiance up into which he has
been mysterioiisly thrust; those first thoughts of
his are nowadays being corroborated in every direc-
tion by the last thoughts of the latest thinker.
Mr. Jack London, one of Nature's own writers, one
of those writers too, through whom the Future
speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the
human soul— ''The Call of the Wild." Following
his lead, others have written of ''The Lure," of
this and that in nature, and all mean the same
thing: that the salvation of man is to be found on,
and by means of, the green earth out of which he
was bom, and that, as there is no ill of his body
w;hich may not be healed by the magic juices of
herb and flower, or the stem potency of minerals,
so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be
cured by the soimd of the sea, the rustle of leaves,
or the songs of birds.

Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world
was very sick. It had lost religion in a night
of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But
since then that mere "matter" which seemed
to eclipse the soul has grown strangely radiant to
deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had
to doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillu-
sionment, now there is no old dream that has not
the look of coming true, no hope too wild and
strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained.
Even, if you wish to believe in fairies, science will
hardly say you nay. Those dryads and fauns,

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I40 TKe Spirit of tKe Open

which Keats saw ** frightened away " by the prosaic
times in which it was his misfortune to be alive
and unrecognized, are trooping back in every
American woodland, and the god whose name I
have invoked has become more than ever

the leaven
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal.

His worship is all the more sincere because it is
not self-conscious. If you were to tell the trout-
fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the camper-out,
that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at
you in a kindly bewilderment. He would seem
a little anxious about you, but it would be only
a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take
him long to realize that you were only putting in
terms of a creed the intuitive and inarticulate
faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing
sign of this new-old faith in nature is the uncon-
sciousness of the believer. He has no idea that
he is believing or having faith in anything. He
is simply loving the green earth and the blue sea,
and the ways of birds and fish and animals; but
he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy that
he seems almost to shine with his happiness.
There is, literally, a light about him — that light
which edges with brightness all sincere action.
The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only
an innocent excuse to be alone with the Infinite.
To be alone. To be afar. Men sail precarious

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TKe Spirit of tKe Open 141

craft in perilous waters for no reason they could
tell of. They may think that trawling, or dredg-
ing, or whaling is the explanation: the real reason
is the mystery we call the Sea.

Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who
goes out to catch fish ; yet there is a great difference
between an angler and a fishmonger. Though
the angler catches no fish, though his creel be
empty as he returns home at evening, there is a
curious happiness and peace about him which a
mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain.
Fish, as I said, were merely an excuse; and, as he
vainly waited for fish, without knowing it, he was
learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence
of ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm
and patience of meadows were dreamily becoming
a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence,
maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, mas-
terful presence, sitting by the stream, whittling
reeds, and blowing his breath into them here and
there, and finally binding them together with
rushes, till he had made out of the empty reeds
and rushes an instrument that sang everything
that can be sung and told you everything that
can be told.

The sun on the hill forgot to die.

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

Do you really think that the huntsman hunts
only the deer? He, himself, doubtless thinks that

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142 TKe Spirit of tHe Open

the trophy of the antlers was all he went out into
the woods to win. But there came a day to him
when he missed the deer, and caught a glimpse
instead of the divine himtress, Diana, high-bus-
kined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds
through the lonely woodland, and his thoughts
ran no more on venison for that day.

The same truth is true of all men who go out
into the green, blue-eyed wilderness, whether
they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies.
They find something stranger and better than
what they went out to seek, and, if they come home
disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is
yet something in their eyes, and across their
brows, a light of peace, an enchanted calm, which
tells those who understand that they, at all events,
have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music
he can make out of the pipy hemlocks or the
lonely pines.

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XIII

AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH

THE charm of an old canal is one which every
one seems to feel. Men who care nothing
about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light
up with romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of
some old disused or seldom-used canal, grass-
grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly
oftener than once a week, a leisurely barge —
towed by an equally leisurely mule, with its fellow
there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his
next eight-mile *' shift'* — ^sleepily dreams its way,
presumably on some errand and to some destina-
tion, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object
other than its loitering passage through a summer
afternoon. I have even heard millionaires express
envy of the life lived by the little family hanging
out its washing and smoking its pipe and culti-
vating its floating garden of nasturtiums and gera-
niums, with children playing and a house-dog to
keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so
feet, whose foundations are played about by fishes,
and whose sides are brushed by whispering reeds.
But the charm of an old canal is perhaps yet
143

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144 An Old American To-w-PatH

more its own when even so tranquil a happening as
the passage of a barge is no longer looked for, and
the quiet water is called upon for no more arduous
usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the
ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself
seems to wield a new peculiar spell in such associa-
tion — old quarries, the rusting tramways choked
with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine
twining tenderly about the old iron of dismantled
pit-tackle, grown as green as itself with the summer
rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only
the moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely
travel. Wherever Nature is thus seen to be taking
to herself, making her own, what man has first
made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchant-
ress, strangely combining in one charm the magic
of a wistful, all but forgotten, past with her own
sibyl-line mystery.

The symbol of that combined charm is that
poppy of oblivion of which Sir Thomas Browne
so movingly wrote: but, though along that old
canal of which I am thinking and by which I
walked a stmimer day, no poppies were growing,
the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-bom
rustling leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike
seemed to whisper of forgetfulness, to be brooding,
even thus in the very heyday of the mad young
year, over time past. And this eloquently retro-
spective air of Nature made me realize, with some-
thing of the sense of discovery, how much of what
we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She

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An Old American Tow-Path 145

is as clever at the manuf acttire of antiques as some
expert -of *'old masters." A little moss here and
there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns
and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild
flowers, and in twenty years Nature can make a
modem building look as if it dated from the Nor-
man Conquest. I came upon this reflection
because, actually, my canal is not very old, though
from the way it impressed me, and from the
manner in which I have introduced it, the reader
might well imagine it as old as Venice and no
yoimger than Holland, and may find it as hard to
believe as I did that its age is but some eighty
years, and that it has its romantic being between
Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware
River.

One has always to be careful not to give too
much importance to one's own associative f^wies
in regard to the names of places. To me, for
instance, *' Perth Amboy " has always had a roman-
tic sotmd, and I believe that a certain majesty in
the collocation of the two noble words would sur-
vive that visit to the place itself which I have been
told is all that is necessary for disillusionment.
On the other hand, for reasons less explainable,
Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic
are names thd.t had touched me with no such
romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no doubt, I had as-
sociated them with absurdity, anarchy, and rail-
roads. Never having visited them, it was perhaps
not stirprising that I should not have associated

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146 An Old American To-w-PatK

them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature
as I now unforgettably recall; and I cannot nelp.
feeling that in the case of places thus tuif ortunately
named, Nature might well bring an action )for
damages, robbed as she thus imdoubtedly is hi a
flock of worshippers.

At all events, I believe that my surprise and
even incredulity will be understood when an artist
friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort Lee
ferry, and trollejdng from the Palisades through
Hackensack to Paterson, I might find — a dream
canal. It was as though he had said that I had
but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at
the World's End. But it was true, for all that —
quite fairy-tale true. It was' one of those sur-
prises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America,
of which there are many, and of which more needs'
to be tol4. I can conceive of no more suggestive
and piquant contrast than that of the old canal
gliding through water-lilies and spreading pastures,
in the bosom of hills clothed with trees that scatter
the simshine or gather the darkness, the haunt of
every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage
and is gone, gliding past flowering rushes and blue
dragon-flies, not

Flowing down to Camelot,

as one might well believe, but between Newark
and Phillipsburg, touching Paterson midway with
its dreaming hand.

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An Old American To-w-PatK 147

Following my friend's directions, we had met at
Paterson, and, desirous of finding our green pasttire
and still waters with the least possible delay, we
took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and
were presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little
village called Little Falls, the last we were to see
of the modem work-a-day world for several miles.
A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though
you had entered some secret green door into a
pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like rustling
walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless
roadway of gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-
path keeping it company, buttressed in from the
surrounding fields with thickets of every species
of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred
with every summer flower.

Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to
an object which seems romantically in keeping
with the general character of the scene — a long
block of stone, lying among the grasses and the
wild geraniums, on which, as one nears it, one
descries carved scroll-work and quaint, deep-cut
lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the
memorial of some great deed, or an altar to the
genius loci^ The willows whisper about it, and
the great elms and maples sway and murmur no
less impressively than if the inscription were in
Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is it in
me to regret that the stone and its inscription,
instead of celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate
the men to whom I owe this lane of dreaming

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148 An Old American Toiw-PatK

water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit
— the ''Morris Canal and Banking Co., a.d.
1829/' represented by its president, its cashier,
its canal commissioner, and a score of other names
of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, there-
fore, to the souls of those dead directors, who,
having only in mind their banking and engineer-
ing project, yet imconsciously wrought, nearly a
century ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest
be lulled by such leafy murmtirs and swajdng of
tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir and
sway along the old canal! * „

A few yards beyond this monumental stone,
there comes a great opening in the sky, a sense of
depth and height and spacious freshness in the air,
such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great
river; and in fact the canal has arrived at the
Passaic and is about to be carried across it in a
sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble
bridge that might well pass for a genuine antique,
owing to that collaborating hand of Nature which
has filled the interstices of its massive masonry
with fern, and so loosened it here and there that
some of the canal escapes in long, ribbon-like
cascades into the rocky bed of the river below.
An aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it
would be hard to say why, a most romantic thing.
The idea of carrying rtmning water across a bridge
in this way — ^water which it is so hard to think of
as imprisoned or controlled, and which, too, how-
ever shallow, one always associates with mysterious

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A.n Old A.merican To-w-PatK 149

depth — the idea of thus carrying it across a valley
high up in the air, so that one may look underneath
it, underneath the bed in which it runs, and think
of the fishes and the water- weeds and the waterbugs
all being carried across with it, too — this, I confess,
has always seemed to me engagingly marvellous.
And I like, too, to think that the canal, whose
daily business is to be a '* common carrier" of
others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being
carried itself; as sometimes one sees on a freight
car a new buggy, or automobile, or sometimes a
locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along — as
though out for a holiday — ^instead of riding others.
And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with
a sense of illimiination how different the word
''Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the
grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed pro-
cession, from the way it looks as it writes its name
in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it
through corridors of that strange pillared and
cake-shaped rock, amid the golden pomp of a
perfect summer day. For a short distance the
Passaic and the canal run side by side, but pre-
sently they part company, and mile after mile the
canal seems to have the world to itself, once in
a great while finding human companionship in
a shingled cottage half hidden among willows, a
sleepy brick-field nm on principles as ancient as
itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks,
or saucy boys disporting themselves in the old
swimming-hole; and

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150 A.n Old American To^w-PatK

Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook
Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree
Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,
Forgetting soon his pride of fishery;

And dreams or falls asleep, \

While curious fishes peep
About his nibbled bait or scornfully

Dart off and rise and leap.

Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing
along the old canal — men, women, boys, and girls.
That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for
repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth.
Then the fish lie glittering in the shallow pools,
as good. as caught, and happy children go home
with strings of sunfish, — ** pumpkin-seeds" they
call them, — tatafigftT ^n d tho like pli^turoyqiir iig, -
.pinfiti'ibli' npoil^, while graver fisher-folk take
coimt of pickerel and bream. This merry festival
was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming
with the lustral renewal of its waters, its depths
flashing now and again with the passage of wary
survivors of that spring battue.

It is essential to the appreciation of an old
canal that one should not expect it to provide
excitement, that it be understood between it and
its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say
and nothing to record. Along the old tow-path
you must be content with a few simple, elemental,
mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you
must be somewhat of a monastic turn of mind,
and have spiritual affiliations, above all, with La

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An Old American Tow-PatK 151

Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal
is Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far
indeed from being a dumb silence, but a silence
that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke
hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient
to the spirit of the hour and the place. For there
were so few of those little gossipy accidents and
occurrences by the way that make those interrup-
tions we call conversation, and such overwhelming
golden-handed presences of simlit woodlands,
flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and
distant purple lulls — all the blowing, rippling,
leafy glory and mighty laughter of a summer day
— that we were glad enough to let the birds do
such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I
seem never to have heard or seen so many birds,
of so many varieties, as haimt that old canal.

As we chose our momentary camping-place
under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant
swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-
blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird,
on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us
defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and
as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread
upon the sward otir pastoral meal, the veery-
thrush — sadder and stranger than any nightingale
— ^played for us, unseen, on an instrument like
those old water-organs played on by the flow and
ebb of the tide, a flute of silver in which some
strange magician has somewhere hidden tears.
I wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush

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152 An Old American Tow-PatH

that, to Walt Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp
in secluded recesses" moiirned the death of
Lincoln:

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the set-
tlements,
Sings to himself a song.

But when the veery had flown with his heart-
break to some distant copse, two song-sparrows
came to persuade us with their blithe melody that
life was worth living, after all; and cheerful little
domestic birds, like the jenny-wren and the chip-
ping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between
whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs,
while the bobolink called to us like a comrade,
and the phcebe-bird gave us a series of imita-
tions, and the scarlet tanager and the wild can-
ary put in a vivid appearance, to show what
can be done with colour, though they have no
song. —

Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green
silence as we found along that old canal, one could
not help feeHng how hard it would be to put into
words an experience so infinite and yet so un-
dramatic. Birds and birds, and trees and trees,
and the long, silent water! Prose has seldom been
adequate for such moments. So, as my friend
and I took up our walk again, I sang him this little
song of the Silence of the Way:

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An Old American Toi«r-PatK i53

Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves,
SnS^whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers,

On whose still breast the water-lily heaves,
And all her speech the whisper of the showers.

Made of all things that in the water sway,
The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead,

The willows murmuring, all a summer day,
"Silence** — sweet word, and ne*er so softly said

As jhere along this path of brooding peace,

Where all things dream, and nothing else is done

But all such gentle businesses as these

Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun

Turning the stream to a long lane of gold.
Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearly

And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold.
Gaze at herself like any mortal girl.

But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expres-
sion of silence, massed as they are with the merest
hint of movement, and breathing the merest
suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such
abundance and variety of trees as along our old
canal — cedars and hemlocks and hickory dominat-
ing green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and
there a clump of silver birches bent over with the
strain of last year's snow; and all along, near by the
water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-
oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in
defiance of bli:;;ht. Nor have I ever seen such
'sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thick-

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154 An Old American Tow-PatK

ets, in which elder and hazels and every con-
ceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane
make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink
and the water-snake, and the imagination that
would fain explore their glimmering recesses.

No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies
and such like happenings, ever happens along the
old canal ; and our nearest to a human event was
our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting
near a moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-
cob pipe, and gazing wistfully across at the
Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds
were billowing and casting slow-moving shadows.
Stopping, we passed him the time of day and
inquired when the next barge was due. For
answer he took a long draw at his corn-cob, and,
taking his eyes for a moment from the landscape,
said in a far-away manner that it might be due
any time now, as the spring had come and gone,
and implying, with a sort of sad htimour in his
eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings
all things back, even an old slow-moving barge
along the old canal.

"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked
the melancholy man, the romantic green -biish and
t he gleam ing water not irrelevantly flashing on
my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the
lily-maid of Astolat on her strange journey, with
a letter in her hand for Lancelot.

"Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing
at his corn-cob, he added, with a sad and tmder-

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An Old American To-w-PatK 155

standing smile, **once in a great while." Like
most melancholy men, he seemed to have brains,
in his way, and to have no particular work on
hand, except, like ourselves, to dream.

''Suppose," said I, ''that a barge should come
along, and need to be drawn up this 'plane' —
would the old machinery work?" and I pointed
to six hundred feet of sloping grass, down which
a tramway stretches and a cable runs on little
wheels — ^technically known, it appeared, as a
"plane."

Then the honour of the ancient company for
which he had once worked seemed to stir his
blood, and he awakened to something like en-
thusiasm as he explained the antique, picturesque
device by which it is still really possible for a
barge to climb six himdred feet of grass and fern
— drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being
raised by locks in the customary way.

Then he took us into the old building where, in
the mossed and dripping darkness, we could dis-
cern the great water-wheels that work this fasci-
nating piece of ancient engineering; and added
that there would probably be a barge coming
along in three or four days, if we should happen to
be in the neighbourhood. He might have added
that the old canal is one of the few places where
"time and tide" wait for any one and everybody
— ^but alas! on thisjoccasion we could not wait for
them.

Our walk was nearing its end when we came

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156 An Old American Tow-PatK

upon a pathetic reminder that, though the old
canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have
been wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a
backwater whispered over by willows and sung
over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard,
eleven old barges were ingloriously rotting, un-
wept and unhonoured. The hulks of. old men-<rf-
war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their
annual days of bunting and the salutes of cannon;
but to these old servitors of peace come no such
memorial recognitions.

"Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to
my friend, '*but they shall not go all unsimg,
though humble be the rhyme" ; s o h e r e io Iht ilijimt
I affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of
the Janita C. Williamst

You who have done your work and asked no praise,

Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways,

Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire,

Doing a small day's work for a small hire —

You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled.

Nor all such cloudy glories of the world;

The laurel of a simple duty done

Is the best laurel underneath the sun,

Yet would two strangers passing by this spot

Whisper, **01d boat — you are not all forgot!"

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XIV

A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS

WE were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves,
but chanced both to be out on our morning
walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common
at the same moment, when the huntsmen and
htmtresses of the Slumberfold Hunt were blithely
congregating for a day's run. A meet is always
an attractive sight, and we had both come to a
halt within a yard or two of each other, and stood
watching the gallant company of fine ladies and
gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts,
keeping up a prancing conversation, till the excit-
ing moment should arrive when the cry would go
up that the fox had been started, and the whole
field would sweep away, a cataract of hounds,
red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts.

The moment came. The fox had been found
in a spinney running down to Withy Brook, and
his race for life had begun. With a happy shout,
the himt was up and off in a twinkling, and
the stranger and I were left alone on the broad
common.

I had scanned him furtively as he stood near
. 157

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158 A Modem Saint Francis

me; a tall, slightly built man of about fifty, with
perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle blue
eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over
him, and he had watched the scene with a smile of
blended humour and pity.

Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speak-
ing almost as though to himself: '*It is a strange
sight," he said with a sigh. '*I wonder if it seems
as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up,
so-called civilized people being so ferociously
intent on chasing one poor little animal for its
life — and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds
up his poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the
fox is not too sly for them), that they have really
done something clever, in that with so many
horses and dogs and so much noise, they have
actually contrived to catch and kill one fox!"

**It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking
just that very thing.

** Of course, they always tell you," he continued,
as we took the road together, ''that the fox really
enjoys being hunted, and that he feels his occupa-
tion gone if there are no hoimds to track him, and
finally to tear him to pieces. What wonderful
stories human nature will tell itself in its own
justification ! Can one imagine any created thing
enjoying being pursued for its life, with all that
loud terror of men and horses and savage dogs at
its heels .'^ No doubt — if we can imagine even a
fox so self-conscious — ^it would take a certain
pride in its own ctuming and skill, if the whole

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A. Modern Saint Francis 159

thing were a game; but a race with death is too
deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own
stratagems. Happily for the fox, it is probable
that he does not feel so much for himself as some
of us feel for him; but any one who knows the
wild things knows too what terror they are capable
of feeling, and how the fear of death is always
with them. No ! you may be sure that a fox prefers
a cosy hen-roost to the finest rtm with the hounds
ever made."

"But even if he should enjoy being hunted,"
I added, **the even stranger thing to me is that
civilized men and women should enjoy hunting
him."

''Isn't it strange.'^" answered my companion
eagerly, his face lighting up at finding, a sym-
pathizer. ''When will people realize that there
is so much more fun in studying wild things than
in killing them ! ..."

He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a
small weed which had caught h!s quick eye by
the roadside, and which he examined for a moment
through a little pocket microscope which I noticed,
hanging like an eyeglass round his neck, and which
I learned afterward quite affectionately to as-
sociate with him. Then, as we walked on, he
remarked:

"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly
civilized. Humanity is a lesson learned very
slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning
it by degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he

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l6o A Modem Saint Francis

threw out his long stride more emphatically — ^the
stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on
the hills.

"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the tmi-
verse!" he resumed, after a pause in which he had
walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me
it is the most mysterious of all things — though, I
suppose, after all, it is no more mysterious than
pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was
the first human being to pity another? How
strange he must have seemed to the others, how
incomprehensible and ridiculous — not to say dan-
gerous! There can be little doubt that he was
promptly dispatched wit^i stone axes as an enemy
of a respectable murderous society."

"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-
hunters would take a similar view of our remarks
on their sport."

"No doubt — and perhaps turn their hotmds on
us ! A man hunt ! ' Give me the hunting of man ! '
as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang."

"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old
verse," I said:

** Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk? . . .
be my friend, and teach me to be thine!"

"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my com-
panion with evident pleastire. "Let us go and
quote it to our fox-hunters!"

"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said.

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A Modern Saint Francis i6i

"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as
yet, we may be sure. They are wonderfvil crea-
tures. It is not surprising that mankind has
always looked upon Reynard as almost a human
being — ^if not more — ^for there is something quite
uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, calculating
way in which he uses them. He is come and gone
like a ghost. One moment you were sure you saw
him clearly close by and the next he is gone — ^who
knows where? He can nm almost as swiftly as
light, and as softly as a shadow; and in his wildest
dash, what a sure judgment he has for the lie of
the ground, how unerringly — and at a moment
when a mistake is death — he selects his cover!
How learned, too, he is in his knowledge of the
countryside ! There is not a dry ditch, or a water-
course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for
miles around that is not mysteriously set down in
the map he carries in his graceftd, clever head; and
one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-
places in and around farm-yards are equally well
known to him. Then withal he is so brave.
How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly
tracked down, with the game quite up, he will
turn on his pursuers, and die with his teeth fast
in his enemy's throat!"

"I believe you are a fox-htmter in disguise,"
I laughed.

"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and
I know something of what those red-coated gentle-
men are feeling. But soon I got more interested

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1 62 A Modem Saint Francis

in studying nature than killing it, and when I
became a naturalist I ceased to be a hunter. You
get to love the things so that it seems like killing
little children. They come so close to you, are
so beautiful and so clever; and sometimes there
seems such a curious pathos about them. How
any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in
its eyes, I don't know. I should always expect
the deer to change into a fairy princess, and die in
my arms with the red blood nmning from her
white breast. And pigeons, too, with their soft
sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the sudden
lapping of sleepy wings roimd the chimneys — ^how
can any one trap or shoot them with blood-curdling
rapidity, and not expect to see ghosts!"

**0f course, there is this difference about the
fox," I said, "that it is really in a sense bom to
be hunted. For not only is it a fierce htmter it-
self, but it would not be allowed to exist at all,
so to say, unless it consented to being hunted.
Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable living for
a certain time, on condition of its providing at last
a spirited exhibition of dying. In other words,
it is preserved entirely for the pmpose of being
himted. It must accept life on that condition or
be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plim-
dered farmer. Life is sweet, after all, and to be a
kind of protected highwayman of the poultry-
yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking
one's chances of being surely brought to book at
last, may perhaps seem worth while."

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A. Modern Saint Francis 163

"Yes! but how does your image of the protected
gladiator reflect on those who protect him ? There,
of course, is the point. The gladiator, as you say,
is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat
living and idleness, as long as he lives. You may
even say that his profession is good for him, de-
velops fine qualities of mind even as well as body —
but what of the people who crowd with blood-
thirsty eagerness to watch those qualities exhibited
in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do
they gain any of his qualities of skill and courage,
and strength and fearlessness in the face of death?
No, they are merely brutalized by cruel excite-
ment — and while they applaud his skill and admire
his courage, they long most to watch him die.
So — ^is it not? — with our friend the fox. The
htmtsman invariably compliments him on his
spirit and his cunning, but what he wants is —
the brush. He wants the excitement of hunting
the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen
say what they will about the exhilaration of the
horse exercise across country as being the main
thing, they know better — and, if it be true, why
don't they take it without the fox?"

*'They do in America, as, of course, you know.
There a man walks across country trailing a stick,
at the end of which is a piece of cloth impregnated
with some pungent scent which hounds love and
mistake for the real thing."

'*Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend.
''Even worse than a red herring. You could

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i64 A. Modern Saint Francis

hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for
Actaeon and tore him to pieces."

"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better
satisfied."

** Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of
their sport is not the cruel delight of pursuing a
living thing to its death, that American plan
should serve all the purposes, and give all the
satisfaction for which they claim to follow the
hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop across coun-
try, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and
pride of taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the
pleasure of watching the hoimds cleverly at work
with their mysterious gift of scent. All the same,
I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not
vote it a tame substitute. Without something
being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is gone. It is as
depressing as a sham fight."

'* Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what
a part it has played in hiunan history! Even
religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men
are never in higher spirits than when they are
going to kill, or be killed themselves, or see some-
thing else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and tiger' die
very hard in the tamest of us."

"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a
sigh. "But I do believe that they are dying none
the less. Just of late there has been a reaction
in favour of brute force, and people like you and
me have been ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimen-
talists. But reaction is one of the laws of advance.

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A. Modern Saint Francis 165

Human progress always takes a step backwards
after it has taken two forward. And so it must
be here too. In the end, it is the highest type
among men and nations that count, and the high-
est types among both today are those which show
most humanity, shrink most from the infliction
of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties
that were the legal punishment of criminals, even
within the last two hundred years, and not merely
brutal criminals, but also political offenders or so-
called heretics — ^how every one thought it the
natural and proper thing to break a man on the
wheel for a difference of opinion, or torture him
with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of
mind, and how the pettiest larcenies were pvm-
ished by death; it seems as if we of today, even
the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the
same race — and it is impossible to deny that the
heart of the world has grown softer and that pity
is becoming more and more a natural instinct in
human nature. I believe that some day it will
have thrust out cruelty altogether, and that the
voluntary infliction of pain upon another will be
tmknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure
will seem too preposterous to be believed, and
soldiers and fox-hunters and pigeon-shooters will
be spoken of as nowadays we speak of canni-
bals. But, of course, I am a dreamer," he con-
cluded, his face shining with his gentle dream,
as though he had been a veritable saint of the
calendar.

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i66 i\ Modern Saint Francis

"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and
yet "

In that "and yet" there was a world of invin-
cible faith that made it impossible not to share his
dream, even see it btdlding before one's eyes —
such is the magnetic power of a passionate personal
conviction.

"Of course," he went on again, "we all know
that 'nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher
can heal.' But because the fox runs off with the
goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken,
and *yon whole little wood is a world of plunder
and prey' — ^is that any reason why we should be
content to plunder and prey too? And after all,
the cruelty of Nature is only one-sided. There
is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange little
wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing
and eating each other. They know the tenderness
of motherhood, the sweetness of building a home
together, and I believe there is far more comrade-
ship and mutual help amongst them than we know
of. Yes, even in wild Nature there is a principle
of love working no less than a principle of hate.
Nature is not all-devouring and destrojdng. She
is loving and building too. Nature is more con-
structive than destructive, and she is ever at work
evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely
it is not for man, to whom, so far as we know,
Nattire has entrusted the working out of her finest
impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the
fairy apparatus of the soul; it is not for him, whose

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A. Modern Saint Francis 167

eyes — of all her children — ^Nature has opened,
the one child she has taken into her confidence
and to whom she has whispered her secret hopes
and purposes; surely it is not for man voluntarily
to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and
he have come from the same great mother, say:
*I am no better than the wolf. Why should I
not live the life of a wolf — and kill and devour like
my brother? ' Surely it is not for the cruel things
in Nature to teach man cruelty — rather, if it were
possible," and the saint smiled at his fancy,
** would it be the mission of man to teach them
kindness: rather should he preach pity to the
hawk and peace between the panther and the
bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but
the good, that are meant for man — though, as
you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to
the precedents of Nature except to excuse that
in him which is Nature at her worst. When we
say, 'it is only natural, ' we almost invariably refer
to that in Nature of which Nature herself has
entrusted the refinement or the elimination to man.
It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good;
and always we forget that we ourselves are a part
of Nature — Nature's vicegerent, so to say, upon
the earth "

As we talked, we had been approaching a house
built high among the heather, with windows look-
ing over all the surrounding country. Presently,
the saint stopped in front of it.

"This is my house," he said. ''Won't you

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1 68 A. Modem Saint Francis

come in and see me some time? — and, by the way,
I am going to talk to some of the village children
about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth,
up at the schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd
come and help me. One's only hope is with the
children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind
you come."

So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill
homeward, havmted by that gentle face, I thought
of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the
wild things so and had made such friends with
them, that they had taught him their language
and told him all their secrets:

With love exceeding a simple love of the things

That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and
peck;
Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or cast their web between bramble and thorny
hook;
The good physician, Melampus, loving them all.
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a
book.

As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that
surrounds my house, something stood for a second
in one of the openings, then was gone like a shadow.
I was glad to think how ftdl of bracken and hol-
lows, and mysterious holes and comers of mossed
and lichened safety was our old wood — ^for the

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A. Modern Saint Francis 169

shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very
fox we had been talking about come to find shelter
with me — ^and, if he stole a meal out of our hen-
roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all the
will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen,
and not one of your tough old capons that some-
times come to table.

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THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN

I DON'T know in what comer of the garden his
busy little life now takes its everlasting rest.
None of us had the courage to stand by, that
summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man,
buried him, and we felt sympathetic for Morris
that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris
loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had
loved him less, more sentimentally than deeply,
we should have indulged in some sort of appropri-
ate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little
stone. But, as I have said, his grave, like that of
the great prophet, is a secret to this day. None
of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief
has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the
other night, as I walked the garden in a veiled
moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks
he was lying — for I remembered how he would
stand there, almost by the hour, watching the
goldfish that we had engaged to protect us
against mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under
the shadows of the great flat leaves. In his short
life he grew to understand much of this strange

170

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TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden 171

world, but he never got used to those goldfish;
and often I have seen him, after a long wistful
contemplation of them, turn away with a sort of
half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say
that he gave it uji. Or, does he lie, I wonder,
somewhere among the long grass of the salt-
marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee
tides widens out into a lake. There indeed would
be his appropriate country, for there was the
happy hunting-ground through which in life he
was never tired of roaming, in the inextinguishable
hope of mink, and with the occasional certainty
of a water-rat.

He had come to us almost as mysteriously as
he went away; a fox-terrier puppy wandered out
of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box,
one November morning, and now wandered back
again. Technically, he was just graduating out
of puppyhood, though, like the most charming
human beings, he never really grew up, and re-
mained, in behaviour and imagination, a puppy to
the end. He was a dog of good breed and good
manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents
canine and human. There were those more learned
in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said
that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears
meant a bar sinister somewhere in his pedigree,
but to our eyes those only made him better-look-
ing; and, for the rest of him, he was race — race
nervous, sensitive, refined, and courageous —
from the point of his all-searching nose to the end

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172 TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden

of his stub of a tail, which the conventional dock-
ing had seemed but to make the more expressive.
We had already one dog in the family when he
arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats
he was never able to make friends, in spite of
persistent well-intentioned efforts. It was evident
to us that his advances were all made in the spirit
of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two
crowning needs of his bUthe sociable spirit. But
the cats received them in an attitude of invincible
distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore
the sorry signature. Yet they had become friendly
enough with the other dog, an elderly setter, by
name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving
ways were due to a combination of natural dignity,
vast experience of life, and some rheumatism. As
Teddy wotdd sit philosophizing by the hearth of
an evening, immovable and pltmged in memories,
yet alert on the instant to a footfall a quarter of
a mile away, they wotdd rub their sinuous smoke-
grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as
though he were a piece of furniture; and he would
take as little notice of them as though he were the
leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag
his tail gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the
floor, as though appreciating the delicate attention.

Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had
at first some slight misgiving, for, amiable as we
have just seen him with his Maltese companions,
and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the

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The Little GKost in the Garden I73

amiability that comes of conscioiis power, and is
his, so to say, by right of conquest; for of all
neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged king.
The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his de-
clining years has been won by much historical
fighting, and his reputation among the dogs of
his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary
for him to assert his position. It is only some
hapless stranger ignorant of his standing that will
occasionally provoke him to a display of those
fighting qualities he grows more and more reluct-
ant to employ. Even with such he is compara-
tively merciful; stem, but never brutal. Usually
all that is necessary is for him to look at them
steadfastly for a few moments in a peculiar way.
This seems to convince them that, after all, dis-
cretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly
they turn around in a curious cowed way, and
walk off, apparently too scared to run, with Teddy,
like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing "
them off the premises. We were a little anxious,
therefore, as to how Teddy would take our little
terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance,
and eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs.
But Teddy, as we might have told ourselves, had
had a long and varied experience of terriers, and
had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no
doubt that, with his instinctive courtesy, he
divined the wishes of the family in regard to the
newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his
favour. This, however, did not save the evidently

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X74 TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden

much overawed youngster from a stem and search-
ing examination, the most trying part of which
seemed to be that long, silent, hypnotizing con-
templation of him, which is Teddy's way of assert-
ing his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled
beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging
out of his mouth, and his eyes wandering help-
lessly from side to side ; and he seemed to be saying,
in his dog way: '*0 yes! I know you are a very
great and important personage — and I am only a
poor little puppy of no importance. Only please
let me go on living — and you will see how well I
will behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that
some such recognition and submission had been
tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail,
that had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and
not only the little terrier, but all of us, breathed
again. Yet it was some time before Teddy would
admit him into anything like what one might call
intimacy, and premature attempts at gamesome
familiarity were checked by the gathering thimder
of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the yotmg-
ster keep his place. But real friendship eventually
grew between them, on Teddy's side a sort of
big-brother affectionate tutelage and guardian-
ship, and on Puppy's — ^for, though we tried many,
we never found any other satisfactory name for
him but ** Puppy" — a reverent admiration and
watchful worshipping imitation. No great man
was ever more anxiously copied by some slavish
flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great

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TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden 175

setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The
occasions when to bark and when not to bark, for
example. One could actually see Puppy studying
the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the
kind. Boiling over, as he visibly was, with the
desire to bark his soul out, yet he could be seen
unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after
some preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones,
had made up his mind that the suspicious shuffling-
by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman
demanded investigation, and limiberingly risen
to his feet and made for the door. Then, like a
btmch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, all
officious assistance, and the two would disappear
like an old and a young thunderbolt into the
resounding distance.

Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely
won on an occasion which brought home to one
the quaint resemblance between the codes and
ways of dogs and those of schoolboys. When the
winter came on, a rather severe one, it soon became
evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered
considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he
was visibly shivering, though he made no fuss
about it. So one of the angels in the house knitted
for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down
his neck and under his belly, and trimmed it with
some white fur that gave it an exceedingly smart
appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there
when it was first tried on, and, for the moment,

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176 TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden

Puppy had to be content with our admiration, and
his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a
more self-satisfied terrier never was than he who
presently sped out, to air his new finery before an
astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should
have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We
had had the curiosity to stroll out to see how he
had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky wood-
land near by, we came upon a curious scene. In
the midst of a clirnip of red cedars, three great
dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black retriever, and
a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in
a circle round Puppy, seated on his haimches,
trembling with fear, tongue lolling and eyes wan-
dering, for all the world as though they were
holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-
party. The offence evidently lay with that dandi-
fied new sweater. One and another of the dogs
smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust;
and, as each time Puppy made a move to get
away, all girt him round with guttural thimder
of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call
that a thing for a manly dog to go arotmd in?
You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you miser-
able dandy."

We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very
well for those great comfortable long-haired dogs
to talk, naturally protected as they were from the
cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them,
and they went on sniflBng and tugging and growl-
ing, till we thought our poor Puppy's eyes and

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The Little GKost in tKe Garden i77

tongue would drop put with fear. Yet, all the
time, they seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed
to be smiling grimly together, wicked old experi-
enced brutes as they were.

Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur
to Puppy, or out of his extremity a new soul was
bom within him, for suddenly an infinite disgust
of his new foppery seemed to take possession of
him too, and, regaining his courage, he turned
savagely upon it, ripping it this way and that,
and struggling with might and main to rid himself
of the acctu-sed thing. Presently he stood free,
and barks of approval at once went up from his
judges. He had come through his ordeal, and
was once more a dog among dogs. Great was the
rejoicing among his friends, and the occasion
having been duly celebrated by joint destruction
and contumely of the offending garment, Teddy
and he returned home, friends for life.

It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and
tender as it grew to be on both sides, perhaps
particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect cause
of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's
bark, and how he is not wont to waste it on trivial
occasions, or without due thought. On the other
hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it —
just for its own sake, particularly on early morn-
ings, when, however fine a bark it is, most of our
neighbours would rather continue sleeping than
wake up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all,

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178 The Little GKost in the Garden

for those who understand him, that it is a purely
artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by
it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes
at seven, the bark is quite different. This bark-
ing of Teddy's seems to be literally at nothing.
Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he
plants himself on a knob of rock overlooking the
salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of the
rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose.
So have I heard men rise in the dawn to practice
the comet — ^but they were men, so they ran no risk
of their Uves. Teddy's practicing, however, has
now been carried on for several years in the teeth
of no little peril; and, had it not been for much
himian influence employed on his behalf, he would
long since have antedated his little friend in Para-
dise. When that little friend, however, came to
assist and emulate him in those morning recitals,
adding to his bark an occasional — I am convinced
purely playful — ^bite, I am inclined to think that
a sentiment grew in the neighbourhood that one
dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy
still barks at dawn as of old, but our Uttle Puppy
barks no more.

Before the final quietus came to him, there were
several occasions on which the Black dog, called
Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. One
there was in especial. He had, I believe, no
hatred for any living thing save Italian workmen
and automobiles. I have seen an Italian workman
throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his

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TKe Little GKost in tKe Garden 179

heels in grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed
him, as did many another clumsily hurled missile.

An automobile, however, on one occasion, came
nearer its mark. Like every other dog that ever
barked, particularly terriers. Puppy delighted to
harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly
nmning ahead of them, barking with affected
savagery, and by a miracle evading their on-coming
hoofs — ^which to him, tiny thing as he was, must
have seemed like trip-hammers pounding down
from the sky. But horses understand such gaiety
in terriers. They understand that it is only their
foolish ftm. Automobiles are different. They
have no souls. They see nothing engaging in
having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly
by; and, one day, after Puppy had flung himself
in a fine fury at the tires of one of these soulless
things, he gave a sharp yelp — **not cowardly!" —
and lay a moment on the roadside. But only a
moment; then he went limping off on his three
sound legs, and hid himself away from all sym-
pathy, in some unknown spot. It was in vain
we called and sought him, and only after two days
was he discovered, in the remotest comer of a
great rocky cellar, determined apparently to die
alone in an almost inaccessible privacy of wood and
coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that
life was still sweet and carried- him upstairs into the
great living-room, and the beautiful grandmother,
who knows the sorrows of animals almost as the

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i8o THe Little Ghost in tKe Garden

old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and
birds, had taken him in charge and made a cosy
nest of comforters for him by the fire, and tempted
his langiiid appetite — to which the very thought
of bones was, of course, an offence — ^with warm,
savory-smelling soup; then, he who had certainly
been no coward — ^for his thigh was a cruel lump
of pain which no human being would have kept
so patiently to himself — ^became suddenly, like
many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-
pity; and when we smoothed and patted him and
told him how sorry we were, it was laughable, and
almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of
moaning talk to us, as much as to say that he
certainly had had a pretty bad time, was really
something of a hero, and deserved all the sjrmpathy
we would give him. So far as one can be sure
about anything so mysterious as animals, I am
sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little
hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feel-
ings of his beautiful nurse, and of his various
solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic skill of
the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly,
however, one day, he forgot his part. He heard
some inspiring barking going on nearby— and, in
a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he
was off and away to join the fim. Then, of course,
we knew that he was well again; though he still
went briskly about his various business on three
legs for several days.

His manner was quite different, however, the

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TKe Little CHost in tHe Garden i8i

afternoon he had so evidently come home to die.
There was no pose about the little forlorn figure,
which, after a mysterious absence of two days,
suddenly appeared, as we were taking tea on the
veranda, already the very ghost of himself. Wea-
rily he sought the cave of the beautiful grand-
mother's skirts, where, whenever he had had a
scolding, he was wont always to take refuge —
barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress,
at his enemies.

But, this afternoon, there was evidently no
bark in him, poor little fellow; everything about
him said that he had just managed to crawl home
to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with
cold dews, and there was something shadowy
about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always
so alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent,
yet questioning and somehow accusing. He
seemed to be asking us why a little dog should
suffer so, and what was going to happen to him,
and what did it all mean. Alas! We cotdd not
tell him; and none of us dare say to each other
that our little comrade in the mystery of life was
going to die. But a silence fell over us all, and
the beautiful grandmother took him into her care,
and so well did her great and wise heart nurse
him through the night that next morning it almost
seemed as though we had been wrong; for a flash
of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his
little legs shook imder him, it was plain that he

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1 82 TKe Little CKost in tKe Garden

wanted to try and be up at his day's work on the
veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the
garden carrying on his eternal investigations, or
farther afield in the coiincils and expeditions of
his fellows. So we let him have his way, and for
a while he seemed happier and stronger for the
sunshine, and the old familiar scents and sounds.
But the one little tired husky bark he gave at his
old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by,
would have broken your heart; and the effort he
made with a bone, as he visited the well-remem-
bered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last
time, was piteous beyond telling. Those sharp,
strong teeth that once could bite and grind through
anything could do nothing with it now. To lick
it sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way,
was all that was left; and there was really a look
in his face as though he accepted this mortal
defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with
his exertions, on a bank nearby. But once more
his spirit seemed to revive, and he scrambled to his
legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the
house, where the beautiftd grandmother loves to
sit and look over the glittering salt-marsh in the
summer afternoons.

Of course, he knew that she was there. She
had been his best friend in this strange world.
His last effort was naturally to be near her again.
Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts.
Only another yard or two and he had been there.

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The Little CHost in tHe Cardezi 183

But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and
everlasting had come to its end, and the little
body had to give in at last, and lie down wearily
once more with no life left but the love in its
fading eyes.

There are some, I suppose, who may wonder
how one can write about the death of a mere dog
like this; and cannot understand how the death
of a little terrier can make the world seem a lone-
lier place. But there are others, I know, who will
scarce need telling, men and women with little
ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gar-
dens; strange, appealing, faithful companions,
kind little friendly beings that journeyed with
them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul.

I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy
playfellow and disciple as we do; if, perhaps, as
he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is sending
him a message. He goes about the place with
nonchalant greatness as of old, and the Maltese
cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey bodies to
and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no
sign of sorrow upon him. But he is old and very
wise, and keeps strange knowledge to himselfo
So, who can say?

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XVI

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSmE

FOR the genuine lover of nature, as distinct
from the connoisseiu* of dainty or spectacular
'* scenery," nature has always and everywhere
some charm or satisfaction. He will find it no
less — some say more — ^in winter than in summer,
and I have little doubt that the great AlkaK
Desert is not entirely without its enthusiasts.
The nature among which we spent our childhood
is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of
showier competition, and I suppose there is no
land with soul so dead that it does not boast itself
the fairest imder heaven.

I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene
which I would not exchange for the Swiss lakes,
yet I presume it is imdeniable that Switzerland
has a more imiversal reputation for natural beauty
than Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the
show places of the earth. So Niagara Falls, the
Grand Canon, the Rockies, and California gener-
ally lord it over America. Italy has such a repu-
tation for beauty that it is almost imf air to expect
her to live up to it. I once ventured to say that

184

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The English Counlrxaide 185

the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and
it says much for such stock pieces in nature's
repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear and tear
of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration
of generations, the batteries of amateur cameras,
the Riviera, the English lakes, the Welsh mount-
ains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-
trodden classics of the picturesque, still remain
haunts of beauty and joys forever. God's master-
pieces do not easily wear out.

Every coimtry does something supremely well,
and England may be said to have a patent for a
certain kind of scenery which Americans axe the
first to admire. English sc^iery has no more
passionate pilgrim than the traveller from the
United States, as the visitors' books of its various
show-places volimiinously attest. Perhaps it is
not difficult, when one has lived in both coimtries,
to imderstand why.

While America, apart from its impressive natural
splendours, is rich also in idyllic and pastoral
landscape, it has, as yet, but little "countryside."
I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think
I am right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of
nature's making, but rather a collaboration re-
sulting from nature and man living so long in
partnership together. In England, with which
the word is peculiarly, if not exclusively, associ-
ated, God is not entirely to be credited with mak-
ing the coimtry. Man has for generations also
done his share.

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1 86 TKe En^lisH Couzitorside

It is perhaps not without significance that the
word "countryside" was not to be found in Web-
ster's dictionary, till a recent edition. Originally,
doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural
districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say
the country side of the town. Not wild or solitary
nature was meant, but nature humanized, made
companionable by the presence and occupations of
man; a nature which had made the winding high-
way, the farm, and the pasture, even the hamlet,
with its church tower and its ancient inn, one
with herself.

The American, speeding up to London from
his landing either at Liverpool or Southampton,
always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep,
rich greenness of the landscape. It is not so
much the specific evidences of cultivation, though
those, of course, are plentifully present, but a
general air of ripeness and order. Even the land
not visible under cultivation suggests immemorial
care and fertility. We feel that this land has
been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over
by sheep, sown and reaped, planted and drained,
walked over, hunted over, and very much beloved,
for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land
to which its people have been stubbornly and
tenderly devoted — still "Shakespeare's England,"
still his favoured "isle set in the silver sea."

As seen from the railway-carriage window, one
is struck, too, by the comparative tidiness of the
English landscape. There are few loose ends, and

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TKe En^lisK Coxxzitorside 187

the outskirts of villages axe not those distressing
diimp-heaps which they too often are in America.
Yet there is no excessive air of trimness. The
order and grooming seem a part of nature's pro-
cesses. There is, too, a casual charm about the
villages themselves, the graceful, accidental group-
ing of houses and gardens, which suggests growth
rather than premeditation. The general harmony
does not preclude, but rather comes of, the great-
est variety of individual character.

Herein the English village strikingly differs
from the typical New England village, where the
charm comes of a prim uniformity, and individual-
ity is made to give place to a general parking of
lawns and shade-trees in rectangular blocks and
avenues. A New England village suggests some
large institution disposed in separate uniform
buildings, placed on one level carpet of green,
each with a definite number of trees, and the very
stmlight portioned out into gleaming allotments.
The effect gained is for me one of great charm —
the charm of a vivid, exquisitely ordered, green
silence, with a touch of monastic, or Quakerish,
decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I
speak of it only to suggest by contrast the differ-
ent, destdtory charm of an old English village,
where beauty has not been so much planned, as
has just ** occurred.**

Of course, this is the natural result of the long
occupation of the land. Each century in succes-
sion has had a hand in shaping the countryside

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i88 THe English Countryside

to its present aspect, and Eng^sh history is literally
a living visible part of English scenery. Here the
thirteenth century has left a church, here the
fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with its
suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey.
Here is an inn where Chaucer's pilgrims stopped
on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field
covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessel-
lated pavement which was once the floor of an
old coimtry house occupied by one of Caesar's
generals.

Those strange grassy moimds breaking the
soft sky-line of the rolling South Downs are the
tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones
at the top of yonder hill was once a British camp,
and those curious ridges terracing yonder green
slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric
battlefield. All these in the process of time have
become part and parcel of the English coimtry-
side, as necessary to its "English" character as its
trees and its wild flowers.

How much, too, the English countryside owes
for its beauty to the many old manor-houses,
gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-
walled gardens and great forestlike parks. What-
ever we may think of the English territorial
system as economics, its service to English scenery
has been incalculable. Without English tradi-
tionalism we should hardly have had the English
countryside.

The conservation of great estates, entailing a

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The English Countrywide i89

certain conservatism in the treatment of farm
lands from generation to generation, and the
upholding, too, of game-preserves, however ob-
noxious to the land reformer, have been all to the
good of the nature-lover. We owe no little of
the beauty of the English woodland to the EngKsh
pheasant; and with the coming of land nation-
alization we may expect to see considerable changes
in the English coimtryside. Meanwhile, in spite
of, or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character
of English landlordism, the Englishman enjoys
a right of walking over his native land of which no
capitalist can rob him. Hence results another
charming feattire of the English coimtryside — the
footpaths you see everjrwhere winding over hill
and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient
rights of these are safeguarded to the people for-
ever by statute no wealth can defy; and, let any
nouveau riche of a landlord try to close one of them,
and he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest
and most persistent organizations of EngHsh John
Hampdens, the society that makes the protection
of these traditional pathways its particular care.
So the rich man cannot lock up his trees and his
woodland glades all for himself, but is compelled
to share them to the extent of allowing the poorest
pedestrian to walk through them — ^which is about
all the rich man can do with them himself.

These footpaths, in conjunction with English
lanes, have made the charm of walking tours in
England proverbial. Certain counties particu-

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190 TKe En^lisK Country side

larly pride themselves on their lanes. Surrey
and Devonshire are the great rivals in this respect.
We say "Surrey lanes'* or "Devonshire lanes,"
as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern
hospitality." Other countiesT— Warwickshire, for
example — doubtless have lanes no less lovely,
but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got
the decision; and, if an American traveller wants
to see a typical English lane, he goes to Surrey or
Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English
pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray.

And the English lane has come honestly by its
reputation. You may be disappointed in Venice,
but you will be hard to please if you are not caught
by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you
must not expect to feel that spell if you tear
through it in a motor-car. It was made for the
loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly
show. If you are in a hurry, you had better
keep to the king's highway, stretching swift and
white on the king's business. The English lane
was made for the leisurely meandering of cows to
and from pasture, for the dreamy snail-pace of
time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering
primroses or wild strawberries, or for the knap-
sacked wayfarer to whom time and space are no
objects, whose destination is anywhere and no-
where, whose only clocks are the rising sim and the
evening star, and to whom the way means more
than the goal.

I should not have spoken of it as "made," for,

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TKe En^isK Countryside 191

when it is most characteristic, an English lane
has no suggestion of ever having been man-made
like other roads. It seems as much a natural
feature as the woods or meadows through which
it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, when it
runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under
green boughs, it seems more like an old river-bed
than a road, whose sides nature has tapestried
with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world
it is the dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer
with perpetual romantic promise and surprise,
winding on and on, one can well believe, into the
very heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful
seems to be waiting for us somewhere in the turn-
ings of an English lane.

Had I sat down to write of the English cotmtry-
side two years ago, I should have done so with a
certain amount of cautious skepticism. I should
have said to myself: *'You have not visited Eng-
land for over ten years. Are you quite sure that
your impressions of its natural beauties are not
the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are
not time and distance lending their proverbial
enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit
England, the spring before last, it was in some
such mood of anticipatory disillusion.

After all, I had said to myself, is not the English
coimtryside the work of the English poets — the
English spring, the English wild flowers, the
English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth?
That longing of Browning expressed in the lines.

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192 The EnglisK Countrywide

O to be in England
Now that April's there!

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier,
thinking **Home Thoughts, from Abroad"; and
are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be trusted
on the subject of daffodils?

Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisit-
ing my native land resulted in an agreeable dis-
appointment. With a critical American eye,
jealously on my guard against sentimental super-
stition, I surveyed the English landscape and
examined its various vatmted beauties and fasci-
nations, as though making their acquaintance for
the first time. No, my youthful raptures had
not been at fault; and the poets were once more
justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If
they see anjrthing, it is usually there. If we can-
not see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes.

Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As
its fragrance is wafted to you from the bushes
where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you
will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises.
Yet, though it is, if I am not mistaken, of rare
occurrence in America, it is not absolutely neces-
sary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any
one who cares to go a-Majring along the banks
of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of Peekskill,
will find it there. But for the primrose and the
cowslip you must cross the sea; and, if you come
upon such a wood as I strayed into, my last visit,

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TKe En^lisH Countryside 193

you will count it worth the trip. It was literally
carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets
(violets that smell, too) so thickly massed together
in the mossy turf that there was scarcely room to
tread. There are no words rich or abtmdant
enough to suggest the sense of innocent luxury
brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of
soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous
and yet so gentle. In all this lavish loveliness
of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a pectdiar
tenderness. The innocence of children seems to
be in them, and the tenderness of lovers.

A lover would not tread
A cowslip on the head —

How appropriately such lines come to mind as
one carefully picks one's way down a green hillside
yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps the
most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet
again, as we pass into another stretch of woodland,
another profusion and another fragrance await us,
the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of
the wild hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches
of these hyacinths in the woods, they seem at
first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces
of the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind,
and, of them all, Shakespeare and Milton alone
have come near to suggesting the loveliness, at
once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of
the earth, that belongs to English wild flowers.
I know not if SheflSeld steel still keeps its position

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194 THe En^lisK Countryside

among the eternal verities, but in an age when
so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened
with the scrap-heap, I coimt it of no small import-
ance to be able to retain one's faith in the English
lark and English wild flowers.

But the English countryside is not all green-
ness and softness, blossomy lanes, moated granges,
and idyllic villages. It by no means always sug-
gests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper.
It is rich, too, in wildness and solitude, in melan-
choly fens and lonely moorlands. To the Ameri-
can accustomed to the vast areas of his own
enormous continent, it would come as a surprise
to reaUze that a land far smaller than many of his
States can in certain places give one so profound
a sense of the wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man
could feel lonelier anywhere in the world than on
a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain.

After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the
largest continent, we can see only a limited portion
of the earth at once. When one is in the middle of
Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as
impressed by the illusion of botmdless water, as
if we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling
billows of close-cropped turf, springy and noise-
less to the tread, as far as the eye can see, one
feels as alone with the universe as in the middle
of some Asian desert. In addition to the actual
loneliness of the scene, and a silence broken only
by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a flock

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The En^lisH Countryside 195

moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an
imaginative loneliness induced by the overwhelm-
ing sense of boundless imrecorded time, the
"dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious
boulders of Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses.
To experience this feeling to the full one should
come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, grass-
grown, choked with underbrush, but still nmning
straight and clearly defined as when it shook to the
tread of Roman legions. It is eery to follow one
of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off
thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then
suddenly to come out again into the world of to-
day, as it joins the highway once more, and the
lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to human-
ity, with perhaps a touring car standing at the
door.

One need hardly say that the English wayside
inn is as much a feature of the English coimtryside
as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been
the theme of essayists and poets for generations,
and at its best there is a cosiness and cheer about
it which warm the heart, as its quaintness and
savour of past days keep alive the sense of roman-
tic travel. There the spirit of ancient hospitality
still survives, and, though the motor-car has re-
placed the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a
detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay
windows with their leaded panes, the tap-room
with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, the
solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bed-

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196 THe English Countryside

time, and the lavendered sheets, still preserve the
atmosphere of a novel by Fielding or an essay by
Addison.

There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can
take one's ease at one's inn, as perhaps in the
hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency and
excellence of these English inns that make it
charmingly possible to see England, as it is best
seen, on foot -or on a bicycle. It is not a cotmtry
of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere
road between. Every mile counts for something.
But, if the luxury of walking it with stick and
knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it
by motor-car, we cannot fail to make one obser-
vation, that of the surprising variety of natural
scenery packed in so small a space. Between
Land's End and the Tweed the eye and the imagi-
nation have encountered every form of the pic-
turesque. In an area some three hundred and
fifty miles long by three hundred broad are con-
tained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic
softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the
South Downs, with their billowy, chalky contours,
the agricultural fertility of Kent and Middlesex,
the romantic woodlands and hilly pasttu-es of
Surrey, the melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the
broad, bosky levels of the midlands, the sudden
wildness of Wales, with her moimtains and glens,
Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors,
Westmoreland, with its fells and Wordsworthian
"Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural

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THe Eng^lisH Countryside I97

beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle pretti-
ness to savage grandeur.

Yet, although all these contrasts are included
in the English scene, it is not of solitude or gran-
deur that we think when we speak of the English
countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule
of a gentler, more humanized natural beauty, in
which the village church and the ivy-clad ruin play
their part. Perhaps some such formula as this
would represent the typical scene that springs to
the mind's eye with the phrase **the English
countryside": a village green, with some geese
stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint
thatched cottages, roses climbing about the win-
dows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens,
with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-
williams and such old-fashioned flowers. At one
end of the village, rising out of a cltimp of yews,
the mouldering church-tower, with mossy grave-
stones on one side and a trim rectory on the other.
At the other end of the village a gabled inp, with a
great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons.
Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pas-
tures, intersected with footpaths and shadowed
with woodlands. A little way out of the village,
an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping
water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping
stream. And winding on into the green, sun-
steeped distance, the blossom-himg English lanes.

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XVII

LONDON — CHANGING AND UNCHANGING

1FIND it an unexpectedly strange experience to
be in London again after ten years in New
York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of
course, there are men to whom one great city is
as another — commercial travellers, impresarios,
globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these,
I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as
in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while
once I might have envied such plastic cosmopoli-
tanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in
London, that, were such an accomplishment mine,
it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as
I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a coun-
try with which I was once so intimate, and which
now seems so romantically strange, while remain-
ing so poignantly familiar. The man who is at
home everywhere has nowhere any home. My
home was once this London — ^this England — ^in
which I am writing; but nothing so much as being
in London again could make me realize that my
home now is New York, and how long and how
instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an

198

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London t Chan^in^and Unchan^in^ 199

American. It is not indeed that I love New
York and America more than I love London and
England. In fact, London has never seemed so
wonderful to me in the past as she has seemed
during these days of my wistful momentary re-
turn to her strange great heart. But this very
freshness of her marvel to one who once deemed
that he knew her so well proves but the complete-
ness of my spiritual acclimatization into another
land. I seem to be seeing her face, hearing her
voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my
heart is full with tmforgotten niemories, and my
eyes have scarce the hardihood to gaze with the
decorum befitting the public streets on many a
landmark of vanished hours. To find London
almost as new and strange to me as New York once
seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning
towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted
Ghost-Land; to be able to find my way through
her streets — ^in spite of the new Kingsway and
Aldwych! — ^with closed eyes, and yet to see her,
it almost seems, for the first time: surely it is a
curious, almost uncanny, experience.

Do I find London changed? — I am asked. I
have been so busy in rediscovering what I had half-
forgotten, in finding engaging novelties in things
anciently familiar, that the question is one which
I feel hardly competent to answer. For instance,
I had all but forgotten that there was so noble a
thing in the world as an old-fashioned English
pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with

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200 London — CHane(in^

a thrill of recognition, that made a friend with
whom I was walking think for a moment that I
had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the
htiman heart who cannot realize how tremulous
with ancient heart-break may seem an old-
fashioned English pork-pie — after ten years in
America.

And, again, how curiously novel and charming
seemed the soft and courteous English voices —
with or without aitches — all about one in the
streets and in the shops — I had almost said the
''stores." I am enamotired of the American
accent, these many years, and — the caliunny of
superficial observation to the contrary — I will
maintain, so far as my own experience goes, that
there is as much courtesy broadcast in America
as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than
in France. Yet, for all that, that something or
other in the English voice which I had heard long
since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar
pleasure, and, though I like the comradely Ameri-
can ''Cap'* or "Professor," and am hoping soon
to hear it again — ^yet the novelty of being addressed
once more as "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain
antiquarian charm.

Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel,
and reading the names and signs on one or two
of the neat old-world "places of business," I came
on the word " sweep." I believe it was on a brass-
plate. For a moment, I wondered what it meant;
and then I realized, with a great gratitude, that

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And UncHan^in|( 201

London had not changed so much, after all, since
the days of Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a
broader thoroughfare, my ears were smitten with
the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune
was changed. It was unmistakably rag-time.
Yet, there was the old piano-organ, and in a broad
circle of spectators, suspended awhile from their
various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels
was performing a spirited Apache dance with a
quite comely short-skirted young woman, who
rightly enough felt that she had no need to be
ashamed of her legs. Across the extemporized
stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted cau-
tiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once
a motor coal- waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-
train, thundered across; but not even these could
break the spell that held that ring of enchanted
loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell
like rain — the eternal spell — still operating, I
was glad to see, imder the protection of the only
human police in the world — of the strolling player
in London town. Just before the players turned
to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I noticed on
the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gather-
ing twilight, to be a group of uplifted spears.
Spears or halberds, were they? It was a little
company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-
lighters, seduced, like the rest of us, from the
strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond music.

To me this thought is full of reassurance,
whatever be the murmurs of change: London has

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202 I^ondon — CHan^in^

still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her
lamp-lighters.

Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet
there are far more horses left than I had dared to
hope, and the hansom is far from extinct. In
fact, there seems to be some promise of its renais-
sance, and even yet, in the words of the ancient
bard, despite the competition of taxis —

Like dragon-ffies,

The hansoms hover
With jewelled eyes,

To catch the lover.

Further, — ^the quietude of the Temple jcemains
imdisturbed, the lawns of Gray's Inn are green as
of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is im-
changed, about the cornices of the British Musetun
the pigeons still flutter and coo, and the old clocks
chime sweetly as of old from their mysterious
stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the
evening sky.

Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to
telephone in London today than it was ten years
ago — ^almost as easy as in some little provincial
town in Connecticut. Various minor human con-
veniences have been improved. The electric
lighting is better. Some of the elevators — ^I mean
the "lifts" — almost remind one of New York.
The problem of ''rapid transit" has been simpli-
fied. All which things, however, have nothing
to do with national characteristics, but are now

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And UncHangin^ 203

the common property of the civilized, or rather, I
shoiild say, the commercialized, world, and are
probably to be foimd no less in full swing in Tim-
buctoo. No one — save, maybe, the citizens of
some small imitative nation — confounds these
things with change, or calls them ** progress."
The soul of a great old nation adopts all such
contrivances as in the past it has adopted new
weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a
Hottentot or a Cook's Tourist can consider such
superficial developments as evidences of '* change/*

There are, of course, some new theatres —
though I have heard of no new great actor or
actress. The old ''favourites'* still seem to do-
minate the play-bills, as they did ten years ago.
There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera House in the
Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet,
surely, it is a monument not so much of changing
London as of that London which sees no necessity
of change.

In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway,
Aldwych, and the broadening of the Strand, I
have been grateful for the temper which seems
to have presided over their making — a temper
combining the necessary readjustment of past
and present, with a spirit of sensitive conservation
for those btiildings which more and more England
will realize as having a lasting value for her spirit.

So far as I have observed, London has been
guilty of no such vandalism as is responsible for
the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar

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204 I^ondon — CHan£(in|(

heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs
less to France than to the human soul. Such
cities as London and Paris are among the eternal
spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those
temporarily in charge of them could be forced
somehow to remember that, when their brief
mayoral, or otherwise official, lives are past, there
will be found those who will need to look upon
what they have destroyed, and who will curse
them in their graves.

Putting aside such merely superficial "changes"
as new streets, new theatres, and new conveniences,
there does seem to me one change of a far higher
importance for which I have no direct e^dence,
and which I can only hint at, even to myself, as
''something in the air." It is, of course, nothing
new either to London or to England. It is rather
the reawakening of an old temper to which Eng-
land's history has so often and so momentously
given expression. I seem to find it in a new alert-
ness in the way men and women walk and talk in
the streets, a braced-up expectancy and readiness
for some approaching development in England's
destiny, a new quickening of that old indomit-
able spirit that has faced not merely external
dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own
internal problems. London seems to me like a
city that has heard a voice crying "Arise, thou
that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with
girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readi-
ness for some new tmknown summons of a

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And UncHan^in|( 205

future that can but develop the glory of her
past.

England seems to be no more sleepily resting
on her laurels, as she was some twenty years ago.
Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the
least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She
is merely realizing that the time is at hand when
she is to win others — that one more of those
many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her
own womb, approa.ches, and that once more she
is about to prove herself eternally young.

New countries are apt to speak of old countries
as though they are dying, merely because they have
lived so long. Yet there is a longevity which
is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I
seem to feel once more is England's — as from my
window I watch the same old English May weather :
the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which
moves always, shouldering the darkest hour, an
oceanic radiance, a deathless principle of celestial
fire.

London, May, 1913.

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XVIII

THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT

WERE one to tell the proprietors of the very
prosperous and flamboyant restaurant of
which I am thinking that it is haunted — ^yea,
that ghosts sit at its well appointed tables, and
lost voices laugh and wail and sing low to them-
selves through its halls — they would probably take
one for a lunatic — a servant of the moon.

Certainly, to all appearance, few places would
seem less to suggest the word *'haimted" than
that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the
busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it
does for blocks aroimd, like a conflagration, the
festive glare of its electrically emblazoned fajade.
Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in
through its shattered roof, the owl nesting in its
banqueting hall, and the snake gliding through
its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with
phantoms than this radiant palace of prandial
gaiety, apparently filled with the festive murmur
of happy diners, the jocimd strains of its vigorous
orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks
and delicate dishes, the rustle of women's gowns

206

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THe Haunted IVestaurant 207

and the fairy music of women's voices. For me
its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing
light, upon which, as upon a swift current, gay
men and women, alighting from motor and han-
som, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-
white napery, fair with flowers — ^f or me the mouth
of the grave is not less dread, and the walls of a
sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces or so
inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend
a night in P6re-la-Chaise, and still be less aware
of the presence of the dead than I was a short
time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a
shudder that once so familiar threshold.

It was twelve years since I had been in London,
so I felt no little of a ghost myself, and I knew too
well that it would be vain to look for the old faces.
Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commis-
sionaire, who so often in the past, on my arrival
in company with some human flower, had flimg
open the apron of our cab with such reverential
alacrity, and on our departure had so gently
tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling the while
a respectfully knowing benediction on the pros-
pective continuance of our evening's adventure.
Another stood in his place, and watched my
lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing
through the window of the treasurer's office to
the right of the hall, I could see that an unfamiliar
figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many
a cheque had been cashed for me with eager
bonhomie. Now I reflected that considerable

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2o8 THe Haunted IVestaurant

identification would be necessary for that once
light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was
welcomed with courtesy by a bowing majordomo,
but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and
when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled stair-
case leading to the gallery where I had always
preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and cane
must pass into aUen keeping, and that no waiter's
face would light up as he saw me threading my
way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a nook of
the balcony, where one could see and hear all,
participate in the general htunan stir and atmos-
phere, and yet remain apart.

Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once
greeted me with an enfolding paternal kindness
was substituted broken English of a less com-
panionable accent. A polite young Greek it was
who stood waiting respectfully for my order,
knowing nothing of all it meant for me — me — ^to
be seated at that table again — ^whereas, had he
been one of half a dozen of the waiters of yester-
year, he would have known almost as much as I
of the "secret memoirs" of that historic table.

In ordering my meal I made no attempt at
sentiment, for my mood went far deeper than
sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the
time, I was living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past,
I made one heartbroken acknowledgment of the
present by beginning with the anachronism of a
dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous,
was unknown and unattainable in that hatmted

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The Haunted Restalii'ant 209

gallery. That coektail was a sort of desperate
epitaph. It miaftt that I was alone — alone with
my ghosts. Yet it had a certain resurrecting
influence, and as I sat there proceeding dreamily
with my meal, one face and another would flash
before me, and memory after memory re-enact
itself in the theatre of my fancy. So much in my
actual surroundings brought back the past with
an aching distinctness — particularly the entrance
of two charming young people, making rainbows
all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter,
who was evidently no stranger to their felicity,
they seated themselves at a neighboiuing table
with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a
moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost,
into each other's eyes. How well I knew it all;
how easily I could have taken the young man's
place, and played the part for which this evening
he was so fortunately cast! As I looked at
them, I instinctively sunmioned to my side the
radiant shade of Atirea, for indeed she had
seemed made of gold — gold and water lilies.
And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came
swiftly with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts,
like the sound of the west wind among the sum-
mer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about
the feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me
once more, "a feasting presence made of light" —
her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her eyes like
blue flowers amid the wheat, anH h^r hngntrij hy
no means parsimoniously concealed, litemlly

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2IO THe Haunted R^estaurant

suggesting that the loveliness of all the water lilies
in the world was amassed there within her corset
as in some precious casketi Ours was not one of
the great tragic loves, but I know I shall think of
Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming
I had ordered champagne — ^we always drank
champagne together, because, as we said, it
matched so well with her hair — champagne of a
no longer fashionable brand. The waiter seemed
a little surprised to hear it asked for, but it had
been the only chic brand in 19 — .

"Look at those two yonder," I said presently,
after we had drunk to each other, smiling long
into each other's eyes over the brims of our glasses.
"You and I were once as they. It is their first
wonderful dinner together. Watch them — the
poor darlings; it is enough to break one's heart."

"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite
needlessly.

"I wonder what else I was thinking of — dear
idiot!" said I, with tender elegance, as in the old
days.

As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic
in our love. It was more a matter of life — ^than
death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours
was perhaps that most satisfactory of relation-
ships between men and women, which contrives
to enjoy the happiness, the fim, even the ecstasy,
of loving, while evading its heartache. It was,
I suppose, what one would call a healthy physical
enchantment, with lots of tenderness and kindness

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XHe Hauntedl R^estaurant 211

in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other.
There was nothing Aiirea would not have done
for me, or I for Aurea, except — ^marry each other;
and, as a matter of fact, there were certain diffi-
culties on both sides in the way of our doing that,
difficulties, however, which I am sure neither of
us regretted.

Yes, Aurea and I imderstood thoroughly what
was going on in those young hearts, as we watched
them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who
better than we should know that hush and wonder,
that sense of enchanted intimacy, which belongs
of all moments perhaps in the progress of a passion
to that moment when two standing tiptoe on
the brink of golden surrender, sit down to their
first ambrosial meal together — delicious adven-
ture! — with all the world to watch them, if it
choose, and yet aloof in a magic loneliness, as of
youthful divinities wrapped in a roseate cloud!
Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and
fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could
you thus sit forever, nor pass beyond this moment,
touched by some immortalizing wand as those
lovers on the Grecian Urn:

Bold LfOver, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. *
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting
ready to go. The wsdbber hm brought the bilU

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212 THe Haunted Restaurant

and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound
meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I
am sure she is anxious."

"Your old test ! " said I. " Do you remember? "

'*Yes! And it's one that never fails," gitd
AoifiiifibswAlviiiSemen. "When a woman goes out
to dinner with a man for the jBrst time, he little
knows how much is going to depend on his way of
paying the bill. If, as with some men one meets,
he studies it through a microscope and adds it up
with anxious brow — ^metowhile quite evidently
forgetting your presence — ^how your heart sinks,
sinks and hardens — ^but you are glad all the same,
and next day you congratulate yourself on your
narrow escape!"

''Was I like that?" said I.

'*Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she
added, touching my arm as with a touch of
honeyed fire: ** O I'm so glad! He did it delight-
fully — quite en prince. Just the right noncha-
lance — ^and perhaps, poor dear, he's as poor "

_^ *'As we often were," I added.

And then through the comers of our eyes we
saw the young lovers rise from the table, and the
man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so
reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were
wrapping up some holy flower. And O those
deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as
he did so!

''That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tenny-
son, ** 'had been a clinging kiss but for the street/ "

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THe Haunted R.esta\irant 213

Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like
Enoch, into heaven — some little heaven, maybe,
like one that Aurea and I remember, high up
under the ancient London roofs.

But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished
too, and I was left alone with my Greek waiter,
who was asking me what cheese I would prefer.

With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my
cigar and settled down to deliberate reverie, as
an opitun smoker gives himself up to his dream.
I savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories;
I took a strange pleasure in stimulating the ache
of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of in-
numerable dead hours. I systematically passed
from table to table all around that spacious peri-
style. There was scarcely one at which I had
not sat with some vanished companion in those
years of ardent, irresponsible living which could
never come again. Not always a woman had
been the companion whose form I thus conjured
out of the past, too often out of the grave; for the
noble friendship of youth haunted those tables as
well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms
and passionate loyalties. Poets of whom but
their songs remain, themselves by tragic pathways
descended into the hollow land, had read their
verses to me there, still glittering with the dawn
dew of their creation, as we sat together over the
wine and talked of the only matters then — and
perhaps even yet — ^worth talking of: love and
literature. Oi these but one can still be met in

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/ 214 THe Haunted R.esta\irant >

London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying
brightness —

Where the oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey,
And the lyre's strings are ever strung. . .. ''

Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature,
how often have we risen from those tables, to
pursue together the not too swiftly flying petticoat,
through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets,
aglow with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle
with eyes brighter far than the city lamps — ^pas-
sionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go
on such quests no more — "another race hath
been and other palms are won.'*

No, not always women — ^but naturally women
nearly always, for it was the time of rosebuds,
and we were wisely gathering them while we
might —

■^.

Thrcxugh the many to the one —

O so manyt
Kissing all and missing none,
, Loving any.

Every man who has lived a life worthy the
name of living has his own private dream of fair
women, the memory of whom is as a provision
laid up against the lean years that must come at
last, however long they may be postponed by
some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good
to remember, granted to some — the years when

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THe Haunted Kestaurant 215

one has reluctantly to accept that the lovely game
is almost, if not quite at an end, and to watch
the bloom and abundance of fragrant young
creatures pass us, tmregarding, by. And, indeed,
it may happen that a man who has won what is
for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still
by his side, may enter sometimes, without dis-
loyalty, that secret gallery of those other fair
faces that were his before hers, in whom they are
all summed up and surpassed, had dawned upon
his life. We shall hardly be loyal to the present
if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's
calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there
must still be minor saints, to whom it is meet, at
certain times and seasons, to offer retrospective
candles — saints that, after the manner of many
saints, were once such charming sinners for our
sakes, that utter forgetfulness of them were an
impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the
most jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of
them is not, of course, desirable, but occasional
private celebrations are surely more than permis-
sible — such celebrations as that "night of memory
and tears" which Landor consecrated to Rose
Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray consecrated
to certain loves of the long ago —

Gillian's dead, God rest her bier.
How I loved her twenty years syne!

Marian's married, but I sit here,

Alone and merry at forty year,

Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

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2i6 THe Haunted R^estaurant

So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought
the burnt offerings of several cigars, and poured
out various libations to my own private Gillians
and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into
Angelica's eyes at this table, and caressed Myrtle's
opaled hand at that, and read Sylvia a poem I
had just written for her at still another. ''Whose

namPQ ciVf^ fivP ^W^^t pympfinniPg/' WrOtC RoSSettL

/Yes, symphonies, indeed, in the ears of memory
are the names of the Ughtest loves that flittered
butterfly-like across our path in the golden sum-
mer of our lives, each name calling up its human
counterpart, with her own endearing personality
distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of ;
smiling, her way of talking, her way of being \
serious, all the little originalities on which she 1
prided herself, her so solemnly held differentia of {
; tastes and manners — all, in a word, that made you
i realize that you were dining with Corinna and
I not with Chloe. What a service of contrast each
j — all unwittingly, need one say — did the other,
j just in the same fashion as contrasting colours
. accentuate the special quality one of the other.
: To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with
{ her Titian red hair and green eyes, her tropic lan-
' guor and honey-drowsy ways, was to feel all the
' keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on the
: following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face,
and eager responsiveness of look and gesture — j
blonde cendre, and fausse maigre — ql being one off
the hot noon, the other a creature of the starli ght

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THe Haunted IVestaurant 217

But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus
writing of these dear bearers of symphonic names.
To talk of them as flowers and fruit, as colour and
perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget
the best of them, and the best part of loving them
and being loved again; for that consisted in their
comradeship, their enchanted comradeship, the
sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a
fearful joy together. For a little while we had
escaped from the drab and songless world, and,
cost what it might, we were determined to take
possession, for a while at least, of that paradise
which sprang into existence at the moment when
"male and female created He them." Such divine
foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown,
or society play the censorious hypocrite, "were
wisdom in the scorn of consequence."

"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such
hours, as I said to myself in my haunted restaurant
— "ah, then came in the sweet o' the year."

But lovely and pleasant as were the memories
over which I thus sat musing, there was one face
immeasurably beyond all others that I had come
there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers
of whom for years that seem past coimting all the
awe and wonder and loveliness of the world have
seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago
she and I had sat at this table where I was now
sitting and had risen from it with breaking hearts,
never to see each other's face, hear each other's
voice again, Volimtarily, for another's sake, we

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2i8 THe Haunted R^estaurant

were breaking our hearts, renouncing each other,
putting from us all the rapture and religion of oiu*
loving, dying then and there that another might
live — vain sacrifice ! Once and again, long silences
apart, a word or two would wing its way across
lands and seas and tell us both that we were still
under the same sky and were still what nature had
made us from the beginning — each other's. But
long since that veil of darkness unpierced of my
star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear
the rustle of her gown in the autimm woods, nor
do the spring winds carry me the sweetness of her
faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed may-
be that, after the manner of phantoms, we might
meet again on the spot where we had both died—
but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving
came gaily to my call, she of the starlit silence and
the tragic eyes came not, though I sat long await-
ing her — sat on till the tables began to be deserted,
and the interregnum between dinner and after-
theatre supper had arrived. No, I began to
understand that she could no longer come to me:
we must both wait till I could go to her.

And with this thought in my mind, I set about
preparing to take my leave, but at that moment
I was startled — almost superstitiously — startled
by a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave
those once familiar halls without one recognition,
after all. It was our old waiter of all those years
ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was
telling me how good it was to see me again, and,

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THe Haunted IVestavirant 219

with consolatory mendacity, was assuring me that
I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him — he
will never know what good it did me to have his
honest recognition. The whole world was not yet
quite dead and buried, after all, nor was I quite
such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed.
Dear old Jim Lewis! So some of the old guard
were still on deck, after all! And, I was thinking
as I looked at him: **He, too, has looked upon her
face. He it was who poured out our wine, that
last time together.*' Then I had a whim. My
waiter had been used to them in the old days.

'*Jim," I said, *'I want you to give this half-
sovereign to the bandmaster and ask him to play
Chopin's Funeral March. There are not many
people in the place, so perhaps he won't mind.
Tell him it's for an old friend of yours, and in
memory of all the happy dinners he had here long
ago.

So to the strains of that death music, which so
strangely blends the piercing pathos of lost things
with a springlike sense of resurrection, a spheral
melody of immortal promise, I passed once more
through the radiant portals of my necropolitan
restaurant into the resounding thoroughfares of
still living and still loving humanity.

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XIX

THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE

THERE never was a shallower or more short-
sighted criticism than that which has held
that science is the. enemy of romance. Ruskin,
with all the April showers of his rhetoric, dis-
credited himself as an authoritative thinker when
he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against that
pioneer of modem romantic commttnication, the
railroad. Just as surely his idol Turner proved
himself a romantic painter, not by his rainbows,
or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of
Storm, Rain, and Speed— an old-fashioned express
fighting its way through wind, rain, and of course
rainbows — ^in the English National Gallery.

With all his love of that light that never was on
sea or land. Turner was yet able to see the romance
of that new thing of iron and steam so affrighting
to other men of his generation. A lover of light in
all its swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a
lover of speed. He realized that speed was one of
the two most romantic things in the world. The
other is immobility. At present the two extremes
of romantic expression are the Sphinx and — the

220

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THe Ne-w F;yrain\is and THisbe 221

automobile. Unless you can realize that an auto-
mobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you
know nothing about romance. Soon the auto-
mobile will have its nose put out by the air-ship,
and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day
when we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good
old easy-going past of the seventy-miles-an-hour
automobile — ^just as we have heard our grand-
fathers talk of postilions and the Bath ** flyer. "

Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and
That Which Changeth Not. In spite of foolish
sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one
of those forces of the tmiverse that is the same
yesterday, today, and forever — the same today
as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander
swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more
inherent in the cosmic scheme, nor fire nor water
more imchangeable in their qualities.

But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is
impractical, is a business-Uke god, and is ever on
the lookout for the latest modem appliances that
can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is
far from being old-fashioned. On the contrary,
true love is always up-to-date. True love has its
telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and
soon it will have its air-ship. In the telephone
alone what a debt love owes to its supposed
enemy, modem science! One wonders how lovers
in the old days managed to live at all without the
telephone.

We often hear how our modem appliances wear

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222 THe Ne-w F;yrain\is and THisbe

upon our nerves. But think how the lack of
modem appliances must have worn upon the
nerves of our forefathers, and particularly otir fore-
mothers! Think what distance meant in the
Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days
to travel, though carried by the swiftest horses.
Horses! Think again of news being carried by —
horses! And once more think, with a prayer of
gratitude to two magicians named Edison and
Bell, and with a due sense of your being the
spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages,
that should your love be in Omaha this night and
you in New York City, you can say good-night to
her through the wall of your apartment, and hear
her sigh back her good-night to you across two
thousand miles of the American flag. Or should
your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her
flirtations all the way across with your persistent
wireless conversation. Contrast your luxiuious
commimicativeness with the case of the lovers of
old-time. Say that you have just married a young
woman, and you are happy together in your castle
in the heart of the forest. Suddenly the courier of
war is at your gates, and you must up and arm
and away with your men to the distant danger.
You must follow the Cross into the savage King-
dom of the Crescent. The husband must become
the crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows
when he shall look on the child's face of his wife
again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he
must go, through immapped no-man's lands, and

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THe Ne-w F;yrain\i8 and THisbe 223

vacuum solitudes of the world's end, and peril and
pestilence meet in every form, the face of his foe
the friendliest thin^ in all his mysterious travel.
Not a pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and
fully five himdred years to the nearest telegraph
office!

And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone
with her maids and her tapestry in the dank isola-
tion of her lonely, listening castle. Not a leaf falls
in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps
the silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of
light which is her window in the armoured stone of
her fortified bridal tower. The only news of her
husband she can hope for in a full year or more will
be the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or
broken soldier, or imaginative pilgrim. On such
rumours she must feed her famishing heart — ^and
all the time her husband's bones may be whitening
imepitaphed outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa.

There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly
tells the tale of such old long-distance days, with
that blending of humour and pathos that forever
goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord
had but yesterday taken imto himself a young
wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came
to him the siunmons to war. Then, as now, there
was no arguing with the tnunpets of martial duty.
The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's tears.
The war was far away and likely to be long.
Months, even years, might go by before that Dan-
ish lord would look on the face of his bride again.

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224 The New P;yramus and Thisbe

So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy,
or a little girl, might be bom to the castle, and the
father, fighting far away, know nothing of the
beautiful news. And there was no telephone in
the castle, and it was five hundred years to the
nearest telegraph office.

S(xthe husband and wife agreed upon a facetious
signal of their own. The castle stood upon a ridge
of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, and
on the ridge the bride promised to build a church.
If the child that was to be bom proved to be a
boy, the church would be builded with a tower; if a
girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way,
and three years passed, and at length he returned
with his pennons and his men-at-arms to his own
country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried
impatiently toward the heKographic ridge. And
lo! when at last it came in sight against the rising
sun, there was a new church builded stately there
— with two towers.

So^it was with the most important of all news in
the Middle Ages; and yet today, as I said, you in
New York City have only to knock good-night on
your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha,
and hear her knock back three times the length
of France; Pyramus and Thisbe — ^with this differ-
ence: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a
sensitive messenger. It has become, indeed, in the
words of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's
Dream, the wittiest of partitions, and the modem
Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest;

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THe Ne-w P^^ramus and TKisbe 225

"Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall . . .
Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for
this!"

So at least I always feel toward the wall of my
apartment every time I call up her whom my soul
loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts.
She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go
hard with us for communication, were it not for
this long-distance wall; and any one who knows
anything of love knows that the primal need of
lovers is communication. Lovers have so deep a
distrust of each other's love that they need to be
assured of it from hour to hour. To the philo-
sopher it may well seem strange that this certitude
should thus be in need of progressive corroboration.
But sgjt is, and the pampered modem lover may
well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-
grandmother supported the days, or even kept
their love alive, on such famine rations as a letter
once a month. A letter once a month! They
must have had enormous faith in each other, those
lovers of old-time, or they must have suffered as we
can hardly bear to think of — ^we, who write to each
other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone
six, and transmit a phonographic record of our
sighs to each other night and mom. The telephone
has made a toy of distance and made of absence,
in many cases, a sufficient presence. It is almost
worth while to be apart on occasion just for the
sake of bringing each other so magically near. It
is the Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you

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226 TKe Ne-w P^raxnvis and TKisbe

have only to say a word, and the jinn of the
electric fire is waiting for your commands. The
word has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra."
Now it is "Central." But the miracle is just the
same.

One might almost venture upon the general-
ization that most tragedies have come about from
lack of a telephone. Of course, there are excep-
tions, but as a rule tragedies happen through
delays in commimication.

If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo
would never have bought poison of the apothe-
cary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use
his long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona,
he would first cautiously disguise his voice. If,
as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but if a
bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he
would, of course, hastily ring off, and abuse
"Central" for giving him the wrong number.
And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo
would wait an hour or two till he was sure that
Lord Capulet had gone to the Coimcil, and ring
up again. This time he would probably get the
nurse and confide to her his number in Mantua.
Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop
in at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo
the whole plot which Balthazar so sadly bimgled.
All that was needed was a telephone, and Romeo
would have understood that Juliet was only
feigning death for the sake of life with him.

But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there

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THe Ne-w Pyramus and TKisbe 227

was not a pay-station as yet in all the wide world,
and it was fully five hundred years to the nearest
telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is
worth considering by the modem mind: that not
only would the final catastrophe have been averted
by the telephone, but that those beautiful speeches
to aiid from Juliet's balcony, made at such des-
perate risk to both lovers, had the telephone only
been in existence, could have been made in com-
plete security from the seclusion of their distant
apartments.

Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies,
few serious historic crises of any kind, that might
not have been averted by the telephone. Strange
indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy
of sentimentalism which calls science the enemy
of love.

Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen
to be its most romantic servant; for all its strenu-
ous and delicate learning it brings to the feet of love
for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of
love across space and time, but it will even bring it
back to you from eternity. It will not only carry
to yotu- ears the voices of the living, but it will
also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the
dead. In fact, it would almost seem as though
science had made all its discoveries for the sake of
love.

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TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES

IT is a pity that our language has no other word
to indicate that one has lived seventy, eighty,
or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the
word ''old" carries with it implications of
"senility" and decrepitude, which many merely
chronologically "old" people very properly re-
sent. The word "young," similarly, needs the
assistance of another word, for we all know indi-
viduals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only
twenty, whom it is as absurd to call "yoimg" as
it is to call those others of seventy, eighty, or
ninety, "old."

"Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve
the limited purpose of numbering the years of unde-
veloped boys and girls. It should stand rather for
the vital principle in men and women, ever expand-
ing, and rebuilding, and refreshing the human
organism, partly a physical, but perhaps in a
greater degree a spiritual energy.

I am not writing this out of any compliment to
two wonderful "old" ladies of whom I am particu-
larly thinking. They would consider me a dimce

228

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T-wo Wonderful Old Ladies 229

were they to suspect me of any such commonplace
intent. No ! I am not going to call them ''eighty
years young," or employ any of those banal
euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but
really club-footed sentimentalists insult the intelli-
gence of the so-called "old." Of course, I know
that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they
know very well that I know. We make no secret
of it. Why should we? Actually though the
number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so
much older than either of them, that it never
occurs to me to think of them as "old, " and often
as I contemplate their really glowing energetic
youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder
what has become of my own.

They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married
Irene's brother — for they allow me the privilege
of calling them by their Christian names — and
they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I
see them together, though of tener apart, for Luccia
and her white-haired poet husband — no "older"
than herself, — are neighbours of mine in the coun-
try, and Irene lives for the most part in New
York — as much in love with its giant developments
as though she did not also cherish memories of that
quaint, almost vanished, New York of her girlhood
days; for she is nothing if not progressive.

But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first
thing it is natural to speak of — so every one else
finds too — ^is her beauty. They say that she was
beautiful when she was young (I am compelled

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230 Two Wonderful Old Ladies

sometimes, under protest, to use the words "young'*
and "old*' thus chronologically) and, of course, she
must have been. I have, however, seen some of
her early portraits, before her hair was its present
beautiful colour, and I must confess that the
Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with
the Luccia of today. I don't think I should have
fallen in love with her then, whereas now it is
impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems
to have grown more flower-like with the years,
and while her lovely indestructible profile has
gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of think-
ing beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beauti-
ful things, has drawn honeyed lines as in silver
point about her eyes and mouth, the wild-roses
of her cheeks still go on blooming — ^like wild-roses
in moonlight. And over all glow her great clear
witty eyes, the eyes of a grand dame who has still
remained a girl. Her himiour, no doubt, has much
to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers
no little surprised, even disconcerted, at finding
so keen a humour in one so beautiful; for beauty
and humour are seldom found together in so
irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at
that often on summer days when I feel the need of
a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and take tea
with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find
her in the garden seated in front of her easel,
making one of her delicate water-colour sketches —
for she was once a student in Paris and has roman-
tic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her mth

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Two Wonderful Old Ladies 231

her magnifying glass, trying to classify some weed
she has come upon in the garden, for she is a learned
botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the
pages of books in which she hoards the pressed
flowers gathered by her and her husband in Italy
and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago,
memorials of a life together that has been that
flawless romance which love sometimes grants
to his faithful servants.

At other times we will talk politics, and I wish
you could hear the advanced views of this "old"
lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, I find
that nowadays the only real progressives are the
" old " people. It seems to be the fashion with the
"young" to be reactionary. Luccia, however, has
been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and,
years before the word "feminist" was invented,
was fighting the battle of the freedom of woman.
And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how
thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces
the problems and developments of the moment!
She is of the stuff the old Chartist women and the
women of the French Revolution were made of,
and in her heart the old faith in Liberty and the
people bums as brightly as though she were
some young Russian student ready to give her
life for the cause. When the revolution comes
to America, stern masculine authority will be
needed to keep her — her friend Irene too — ^from
the barricades.

"Stem masculine authority"! As I write that

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232 Two Wonderful Old Ladies

phrase, how plainly I can hear her mocking
laughter; for she is nevei- more delightful than
when pouring out her raillery on the magisterial
pretensions of man. To hear her talk! The idea
of a mere man daring to assume any authority or
direction over a woman! Yet we who know her
smile and whisper to ourselves that, for all her
witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women the most
feminine, and really the most ** obedient" of wives
— a rebel in all else save to the mild tyranny of the
poet she has loved, honoured, and yes! obeyed, all
these wonderful years.

Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthful-
ness so expressive as in her adorable gaiety. Like
a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming up from the
heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side
merely technically young people seem heavy and
serious. And nothing amuses her more than grave-
ly to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some
proper acquaintance, or some respectable strangers,
with her carefully designed mock improprieties of
speech or action. To look at the loveliest of grand-
mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to
the uninitiated visitor to hear her talk, with her
rarely distinguished manner, of frivolous matters
with which they assume she has long since
done.

A short while ago, when I was taking tea with
her, she had for visitor a staid old-maidish lady,
little more than half her age, whom she had known
as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the

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Two Wonderful Old Ladies 233

course of conversation, she turned to her guest,
with her grand air:

"Have you done much dancing this season?"
she asked.

"O indeed no," answered the other unsus-
piciously, ''my dancing days are over."

"At yovir age!" commented Luccia with sur-
prise. "Nonsense! You must let me teach you
to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely
this winter."

"Really.^" gasped the other in astonishment,
with that intonation in the voice naturally so
gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the
person talking with them really regards them
as dead and buried.

"Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect
seriousness. * ' I dance it with my grandsons. My
husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the
polka."

Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid —
acttially "old" compared with Luccia — looked
from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her
polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over
his pipe, a little withdrawn from them on the
veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at the
darling nonsense of her who is still the same mad-
cap girl he first fell in love with so many years
ago.

When the guest had departed, with a puzzled,
questioning look still lingering on her face, Luccia
turned to me, her eyes bright pools of merriment :

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234 Two Wonderfvil Old Ladies

"It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try-
it."

And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and
we executed quite a passable tango up and down
the veranda, to the accompaniment of her hus-
band's — '*Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you
are!"

A certain reputation for '*wildness," a savour of
innocent Bohemianism, has clung to Luccia,
and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy
from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely
out of their girlhood, they were fellow art-students
together in Paris. Belonging both to aristo-
cratic, rather straitlaced New England families,
I have often wondered how they contrived to
accomplish that adventure in a day when such
independent action on the part of two pretty
young ladies was an adventure indeed. But it was
the time when the first vigorous spring of feminine
revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George
Eliot, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leaders
were setting the pace for the advanced women,
and George Sand was still a popular romancer.
As a reminiscence of George Sand, Luccia to
this day pretends that she prefers to smoke
cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact,
she has never smoked either, and has, indeed, an
ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco — even in
the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it,
of course, for the fun of seeming "naughty";
which recalls to my mind her shocking behaviour

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T-wo Wonderful Old Ladies 235

one day when I went with her to call on some very
prim cousins in New York. It was a household of
an excessively brown-stone respectability, just
the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia.
As we sat together in an upright conversation that
sounded like the rustling of dried leaves in a
cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty years,
seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the
tomb-like room with living light and fragrance. I
could see the wickedness in her surging for an out-
burst. She was well aware that those respectable
connections of hers had always looked upon her
as a sort of '* artistic" black sheep in the family.
Presently her opportunity came. As our visit
dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler
entered, in pursuance of the early Victorian ritual
on such occasions, bearing a tray on which was a
decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and
some dry biscuits of a truly early Victorian dry-
ness. This ghostly hospitality was duly dis-
pensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything
but tea, instead of sipping her sherry with a lady-
like aloofness, drained her glass with a sudden
devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident
amazement even of the furniture, held it out
to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never
disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before.
And when to her action she added words, the room
absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I feel,"
she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes
which only I could suspect rather than see, "I feel

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236 Two Wonderfvil Old Ladies

today as if I should like to go on a real spree. Do
you ever feel that way?"

A palpable shudder passed through the room.

"Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged
mtunmies; the brother with actual sternness, and
the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric
cousin really gone out of her mind at last?

"Never feel that way?" she added, delighting
in the havoc she was making. " You should. It's
a wonderful feeling."

Then she drained her second glass, and to
the evident relief of all three, rose to go. How
we laughed together, as we sped away in our taxi-
cab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation
with such people," she said, that dear, fantastic
Luccia.

A propos that early Parisian adventure, Rosa
Bonheur had been one of Luccia's and Irene's great
exemplars, and one might say, in one particular
connection, — heroes. I refer to the great painter's
adoption of masculine costume. Why two unusu-
ally pretty young women should bum to discard
the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in
exchange for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard
to understand. But it was the day of Mrs.
Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest
yoimg "intellectuals" among women had a notion,
I fancy, that to shake off their silks and laces was,
symbolically, at all events, to shake off the general
disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an
assertion of a mental equality with man. At all

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Two Wonderfvil Old Ladies 237

events, it was a form of defiance against their sex's
immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed
to the imaginations of some yotmg women of the
period. Another woman's weakness to be sternly
discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her hair.
That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to
imagine the horror of such relatives as I have
hinted at when our two beautiful adventtu-esses
returned from Paris, and appeared before their
families in great Spanish cloaks, picturesque,
coquettish enough you may be sure, veiling with
some show of discretion those hideous compromises
with trousers invented and worn by the strong-
minded Mrs. Bloomer, and wearing their hair
after the manner of Florentine boys. To face
one's family, and to walk New York streets so
garbed, must have needed real covirage in those
days; yet the two friends did both, and even for
a while accepted persecution for vagaries which
for them had the dead-seriousness of youth.

Passionate yotmg propagandists as they were,
they even preferred to abandon their homes for a
while — ^rather than their bloomers — ^and, taking a
studio together in New York, started out to earn
their own living by the teaching of art. Those
were the days of the really brave women.

But to return to the less abstract topic of the
bloomers, I often tease Luccia and Irene about
them, seeking for ftu-ther information as to why
they ever came to retrograde from a position so
heroically taken, one of such serious import to

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238 Two Wonderful Old Ladies

human progress, and to condescend once more to
don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as
they do today, in delicate draperies which the eye
searches in vain for any hint of sanguinary revolu-
tion. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the ques-
tion. She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous
backsliding and occasionally threatens to make up
for it by a return to masculine costume — ^looking
the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she
says it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of
hers smiling knowingly to himself on such occa-
sions, and it has not been difficult to guess why and
when those historic bloomers disappeared into
the limbo of lost causes. There is little doubt that
when Love came in by the door, the bloomers went
out, so to speak, by the window.

Irene seems to have held out longer, and,
doubtless, scornful of her more frivolous com-
rade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile
imsupported, walking the world in bloomered
loneliness — till a like event overtook her. Such
is the end of every maid's revolt ! But Irene, to
this day, retains more of her student seriousness
than her more worldly-minded friend. Her face is
of the round cherubic type, and her large heavy-
lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling
humour no less deep than Luccia's, but more
reflective, chuckling quietly to itself, though
on occasion I know no one better to laugh with,
even giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas
Luccia will talk gaily of revolution and even

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Two Wonderful Old Ladies 239

anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath
talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains
the ptu'poseful revolutionary student she was as a
girl; while Luccia contents herself with flashing
generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest
developments of thought and society, reads all the
new books, sees all the new plays and pictures, and
has all the new movements of whatever kind — art,
philosophy, and sociology — at her finger ends; and
I may add that her favourite writer is Anatole
France. Whenever I need light on the latest
artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a
movement (cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndi-
calism, or the like) I go to her, certain that she
will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern"
for this wonderful **old" lady of seventy-nine;
and, whenever I am in town, we always go together
to the most ** advanced" play in the newest of
new theatres.

A propos our theatre-going together, I must
not forget a story about her which goes back to
that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling to
take tea with her, I foimd her seated with a fine
soldierly white-haired "old" man, and they were
in such merry talk that I felt that perhaps I was
interrupting old memories. But they generously
took me into the circle of their reminiscence.
They had been laughing as I came in — "Shall I
tell him. General?" she said, "what we were laugh-
ing about?" Then she did. She and the General
had been girl and boy together, and as they came

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240 Two Wonderful Old Ladies

to eighteen and nineteen had been semi-serious
sweethearts. The embryo General — ^no doubt
because of her pretty face — ^had taken all her stud-
ent vagaries with lover-like seriousness, and had,
on one ocasion, assisted in a notable enterprise.
The bloomers had not been definitely donned at
that time, but they were on the way, glimmering
ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a
preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of
a "dare," I am not quite sure. I think it was a
little of both, and that the General had dared Irene
to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed
in boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge,
borrowing a suit of clothes from her brother for
the purpose. Her figure, according to the Gen-
eral's accoimt, had looked anything but mascu-
line, and her hair, tucked up imder her boy's hat
as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her
heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman
had turned upon the youthful pair a suspicious
scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels at his
glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office,
and hid her face behind a fat man as they had
scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how during
the whole performance a keen-faced woman had
glanced at her with a knowing persistency that
seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure
and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had
been — ^just to be in boy's clothes and go in them
to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O youth!
youth! youth!

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T-wo Wonderfvil Old Ladies 241

As I looked at the General with his white hair,
and Irene with her quaint little old lady's cap
over her girlish face, and visualized for myself
those two figures before me as they had appeared
on the night of that escapade, I realized that the
real romance of life is made by memory, and that
for these two old friends to be able thus to recall
together across all those years that laughing freak
of their young blood was still more romantic than
the original escapade. But as I went on looking
at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth
upon her, I grew jealous of the General's share in
that historic night. Well, never mind, it is
I who take her to the theatre nowadays — and,
after all, I think I prefer her to go dressed just
as she is.
Id

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XXI

A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

CHRISTMAS already! However welcome
its coming, Christmas always seems to
take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at
the end of its journey ? Why, it seems only yester-
day that it needed a special effort of remembrance
to date our letters with the new **anno dominV
And have you noticed that one always does that
reluctantly, with something almost of misgiving?
The figures of the old year have a warm human
look, but those of the new wear a chill, tmfamiliar,
almost menacing expression. Nineteen hundred

mtur and we know. It is nearly *'all in." It has

* done its best — and its worst. Between Christmas
,Day and New- Year it has hardly time to change
its character. Good or bad, as it may have been,
we feel at home with it, and we are fain to keep the
old almanac a little longer on the wall. But the
last leaves are falling, the days are shortening.
There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for
weeks past it has already been Christmas in the
shops.

Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older.
') 242

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A CHristmas Meditation 243

On the first of January last we had twelve brand-
new months of a brand-new year to spend, and
now the last of them is all but spent. We had
a new spring to look out for, like the coming of
one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in
prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sun-
shine, a new autumn, with ruddy orchards and the
glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the
four new seasons that were to be ours but one
remains:

And here is but December left and I,

To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May,
And if the wild rose with so fine a flush

Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way
The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet,

And if the throstle sang in yonder bush,
And if the lark dizzied with song the sky.

I watched and listened — yet so sweet, so fleet,
The mad young year went by !

Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that
somehow we have missed it, have failed to experi-
ence it all to the full, taken it too carelessly, not
dwelt suflficiently on its rich, expressive hours.
Each year we feel the same, and however intent we
may have been, however we have watched and
listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust
each passing moment, when the year-end has come,
we seem somehow to have been cheated after all.
Who, at the beginning of each year, has not pro-
mised himself a stricter attentiveness to his

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244 ^ CHristmas Meditation

experience? This year he will "load every rift
with ore."

This year, I said, when first along the lane

With tiny nipples of the tender green
The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again,

This year I watch and listen; I have seen
So many springs steal profitless away,

This year I gamer every sound and sweet.
And you, young year, make not such haste to bring

Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet,
Treasure on treasure of the precious spring;

But bring all softly forth upon the air,
Unhasting to be fair. . . .

Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems
to have escaped us. We know that the birds
sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass
was green, but it seems to us that we did not take
our joy of them with sufficient keenness; our sweet-
heart came, but we did not look deep enough into
her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose
again ! But meanwhile here is the snow.

Unless we are still numbered among those
happy people for whom Christmas-trees are laden
and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas
cannot but make us a little meditative amid our
mirth, and if, while Santa Claus is dispensing his
glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a little
wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful
thoughts, or on that accoimt less seasonable in
character; for Christmas is essentially a retrospect-

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A. CHristmas Meditation 245

ive feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed
a proper piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our
sad memories, as it were to cheer themselves, with-
in the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always
been invited to Christmas parties, and whether
they are seen or not, they always come; nor is
any form of story so popular by the Christmas
fire as the ghost-story — which, when one thinks
of it, is rather odd, considering the mirthful
character of the time. Yet, after all, what are our
memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful
ghosts that come to the Christmas fire!

Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the
Absent, the Festival of the Far- Away, for the most
prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about the
Christmas fire can but include a small number of
those we would fain have there; and have you
ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That is,
they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences,
dependent upon our faithful remembrance for their
embodiment. We may not, with our physical
eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have
so seen them for twenty years; it may be decreed
that we shall never see them again; we seldom,
perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of
each other is +hat we are alive and love each other
across space and time. Alive — ^but how? Scarce
otherwise, surely, than the imforgotten dead
are alive — alive in imforgetting love.

It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought,
how much of our real life is thus literally a ghost-

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#- *

246 A. CHristmaa Meditation

story. Probably it happens with the majority of
us that those who mean most to us, by the neces-
sities of existence, must be far away, met but now
and then in brief iBiashes of meeting that often seem
to say so much less than absence; our intercourse
is an intercourse of the imagination — yet how real!
They belong to the unseen in our lives, and have
all its power over us. The intercourse of a mother
and a son — ^is it not often like that in a world
which sends its men on the four winds, to build and
fight, while the mother must stay in the old nest?
Seldom at Christmas can a mother gather all her
children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big
boys are seven seas away, and even her girls have
Christmas-trees of their own. But motherhood
is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing,
and the big boys and the old mother are not really
divided. They meet unseen by the Christmas
fire, as they meet all the year roimd in that mysteri-
ous ether of the soul, where space and time are
not.

Yes, it is strange to think how small a pro-
portion of our lives we spend with those we love;
even when we say that we spend all our time with
them. Husband and wife even — ^how much of the
nearness of the closest of human relations is, and
must be, what Rossetti has called "parted pre-
sence ! " The man must go forth to his labour imtil
the evening. How few of the twenty-four hours
can these two beings who have given their whole
lives to each other really give ! Husband and wife

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jfii, CHristmas Meditation 247

even must be content to be ghosts to each other for
the greater part of each day. As Rossetti says in
his poem, eyes, hands, voice, Ups, can meet so
strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only
in the invisible home of the heart can the most
fortimate husband and wife be always together:

Your heart is never away,

But ever with mine, forever,

Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray.

Two souls no power may sever.

Together, O my love, forever!

When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't
think you quite liked the saying. It gave you a
little shiver. It seemed rather grimly fantastic.
But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin
to see the comfort in the thought? begin to see the
inner connection between Christmas and the^_
ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is
the ever presence of the absent through love;
the ghostly, that is to say the spiritual, nature of
all htmian intercourse. Our realities can exist
only in and through our imaginations, and the most
important part of our lives is lived in a dream with
dream-faces, the faces of the absent and the dead —
who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike /
brought near. ^

I have a friend who is dead — ^but I say to myself
that he is in New Zealand ; for, if he were"VealIy in

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248 A. CHristmas Meditation

New Zealand, we should hardly seem less distant,
or be in more frequent communication. We
should say that we were both busy men, that the
mails were infrequent, but that between us there
was no need of words, that we both *' imderstood. **
That is what I say now. It is just as appropriate.
Perhaps he says it too. And — ^we shall meet by
the Christmas fire.

I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in
England. We have not met for twelve years. He
never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall
never meet, never even write to each other, again.
It is our way, the way of many a friendship, none
the less real for its silence — ^friendship by faith, one
might say, rather than by correspondence. My
dead friend is not more dumb, not more invisible.
When these two friends meet me by the Christmas
fire, will they not both alike be ghosts — ^both, in a
sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive?

^^^ It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple
human feelings one for another at Christmas-time
corroborate the mystical message which it is the
church's, meaning to convey by this festival of
'* peace and good-will to men'* — the power of the
Invisible Love; from the mystical love of God for
His world, to the no less mystical love of mother

Wid child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend,
^^nd, when you think of it, is not this festival
founded upon what, without irreverence, we may
call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? Was
there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full

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A CHristmas Meditation 249

of marvels, a story with so thrilling a message from
the imseen? Taken just as a story, is there
anything in the Arabian Nights so marvellous as
this ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all
marble and blood and bronze, against a pitiless sky
of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule
ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to
stars — a merciless wall of power. Strength never
planted upon the earth so stem a foot. Never
was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed
and conquered eye.

And against all this marble and blood and bronze,
what frail fantastic attack is this.'* What quaint
expedition from fairy-land that comes so insigni-
ficantly against these battlements on which the
Roman helmets catch the setting sim?

A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea.
Three Wise Men from the East. Some Frank-
incense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child.

Yes, a fairy-tale procession — ^but these are to
conquer Rome, and that child at his mother's
breast has but to speak three words, for all that
marble and bronze to melt away: *'Love One 1
Another." -^

It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous
weapon — ^three gentle words. So one might attack
a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before
them> for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so
cruel a world can never be again. The history of
Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi is the history
of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men

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250 A. Christmas Meditation

it martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last
to open its prison doors by the passive imperative
of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are
terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of
man, but they are as vapour before the breath of the
soul. Many enthroned and magisterial authorities
seem so much more important and powerful than
the simple human heart, but let the trial of strength
come, and we see the might of the delicate invisible
energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery to
support the dreams of man.

Christmas is the friendly human aimoimcement
of this ghostly truth ; its holly and boar's-head are
but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that
mystic gospel of — The Three Words; the Gospel
of the Unseen Love.

And how well has the church chosen this par-
ticular season of the year for this most subtly
spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because its
ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human
mirth, and thus the more unconsciously operative
in human hearts!

Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual
in its beauty, was indeed the season to catch our
ears with this ghost-story of the Invisible and
Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of
sensuous charm and seductiveness. With endless
variety of form and colour and fragrance, they
weave **a flowery band to bind us to the earth."
They are running over with the pride of sap, the
luxury of green leaves, and the intoxicating fulness

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i\ CHriatxnas Meditation 251

of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous
enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft
dazzle of moted sunshine. But the beauty of
winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural,
thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a
nearer approach found to be rich in exquisite
exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and
satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has
foimd less favour with the poets than the other
seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained air,
as though the poet were making the best of a
barren theme, like a portrait-painter reluctantly
flattering some imattractive sitter. But one poet
has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of
winter with unforced sympathy — Coventry Pat-
more, whose "Odes," in particular, containing
as they do some of the most rarely spiritual
meditation in English poetry, are all too little
known. In one of these he has these beautiful
lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory :

I, singularly moved

To love the lovely that are not beloved.

Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace

The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face.

It is not death, but plenitude of peace;

And this dim doud which doth the earth enfold

Hath less the characters of dark and cold

Than light and warmth asleep,

And intermittent breathing still doth keep

With the infant harvest heaving soft below

Its eider coverlet of snow.

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252 A Christmas Meditation

The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain
austere classics of literature and art, and as with
them, also, it demands a certain almost moral
strenuousness of application before it reveals itself.
The loftiest masterpieces have something aloof
and cheerless about them at our first approach,
something of the cold breath of those starry spaces
into which they soar, and to which they uplift
our spirits. When we first open Dante or Milton,
we miss the flowers and the birds and the human
glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling
poets. But after awhile, after our first rather
bleak introduction to them, we grow aware that
these apparently undecorated and immusical mas-
terpieces are radiant and resoimding with a beauty
and a music which *'eye hath not seen nor ear
heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the
song of birds the music of the spheres, and for
that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.

Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange
beauty peculiar to itself, but it is a beauty we must
be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty of the
other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, with-
out effort. To study the beauty of summer, it is
enough to lie imder green boughs with half -closed
eyes, and listen to the running stream and the
murmur of a million wings. But winter's is no
such idle lesson. In summer we can hardly stay
indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded
to go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome
that first disinclination, else we shall know noUiing

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A CHri^tmas Meditation 253

of winter but its churlish wind and its ice-in-the-
pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors
on a sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we
finding out the mistake we were making, coddling
ourselves in the steam-heat ! Indoors, indeed, the
prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness;
snow-clad roofs, snow-laden boughs, silhouetted
tracery of leafless trees; but we said that it was a
soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death,
and the abhorred coldness thereof. We have
hardly walked a himdred yards, however, before
impressions very different are crowding upon us,
among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or
only retained as pleasantly heightening the rest.
Far from the world's being dead, as it had
seemed indoors, we are presently, in some strange
indefinable way, made intensely conscious of a
curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as
though the crystal atmosphere was, so to say,
ecstatically charged with the invisible energy of
spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the
snow, we seem to hear the very breathing of the
spirit of life. The cessation of all the myriad little
sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from
the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us
to hear the solemn beat of the very heart of earth
itself. We seem very near to the sacred mystery
of being, nearer than at any other season of the
year, for in other seasons we are distracted by its
pleasurable phenomena, but in winter we seem
close to the very mystery itself; for the world

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254 A CHristmas Meditation

seems to have put on robes of pure spirit and
ascended into a diviner ether.

The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual
air which those of summer lack, a phantom-like
strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how
ghostly this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic
shapes taken by both; the dream-like foliage,
and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic
diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of
the frost, the fretted crystal shapes that hang the
brook-side with rarer than Venetian glass, the
strange jBiowers that stealthily overlay the windows,
even while we watch in vain for the imseen hand!
No jBiowers of summer seem so strange as these,
make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery
of Hfe. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it
not as though a spirit passed?

As we walk on through the shining morning, we
ourselves seem to grow rarefied as the air. Our
senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener
sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become
spiritual rather than physical organs, and an
exquisite elation, as though we were walking on
shining air, or winging through celestial space,
fills all our being. The material earth and our
material selves seem to grow joyously transparent,
and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-
leather ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we
seem, nevertheless, to be spirits moving without
effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, in

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A. CHristmas Meditation 255

Slimmer are we thus made conscious of, so to say,
our own ghosts, thus lifted up out of our material
selves with a happy sense of disembodiment.

There would, indeed, seem to be some relation
between temperature and the soul, and something
literally purifying about cold. Certain it is that
we return from our winter's walk with something
sacred in our hearts and something shining in our
faces, which we seldom, if ever, bring back with us
in simimer. Without tmderstanding the process,
we seem to have been brought nearer to the
invisible mystery, and a solemn peace of happy
insight seems for a little while at least to possess
our sotds. Our white walk in the snow-bright air
has in some way quickened the half -torpid immor-
tal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of
our spiritual significance and destiny, made us once
more, if only for a little, attractively mysterious to
ourselves. Yes! there is what one might call a
certain monastic discipline about wiyiter which
impels the least spiritual minded to meditation on
his mortal lot and its immortal meanings ; and thus,
as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose
winter for its most Christian festival. The heart
of man, thus prepared by the very elements,
is the more open to the message of the mir-
aculous love, and the more ready to translate
it into terms of human goodness. And thus, I
hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made
clear.

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2S6 A CHristmas Meditation

But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts.
Let us end with a song for the children :

O the big red sun,
And the wide white world,

And the nursery window
Mother-of-pearled ;

And the houses all

In hoods of snow,
And the mince-pies.

And the mistletoe;

And Christmas pudding.

And berries red.
And stockings hung

At the foot of the bed;

And carol-singers.

And nothing but play— ^
O baby, this is

Christmas Day!

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XXII

ON RE-READING WALTER PATER

IT is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense
of reassurance of which one may, in moods of
misgiving, have felt the need during two decades
of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so
pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Medi-
tation coming, for all the captains and the shouting,
so surely into his own. The acceptance of Walter
Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it
is more and more becoming an acceptance such
as he himself would have most valued, an ac-
ceptance in accordance with the full significance
of his work rather than a one-sided apprecia-
tion of some of its Corinthian characteristics.
The Doric qualities of his work are becoming
recognized also, and he is being read, as he has
always been read by his true disciples — ^so not
inappropriately to name those who have come
under his graver spell — ^not merely as a prosateur
of purple patches, or a sophist of honeyed counsels
tragically easy to misapply, but as an artist of the
interpretative imagination of rare insight and
magic, a writer of deep humanity as well as aes-
17 257

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258 On Re-Reading Walter Fater

thetic beauty, and the teacher of a way of life at
once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer pos-
sible to parody him — after the fashion of Mr. Mai-
lock's brilliancy in The New Republic — ^as a writer oi
"all manner and no matter," nor is it possible any
longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels
of unrestrained libertinism which have taken in
vain the name of Epicurus. His highly wrought,
sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style
is seen to be what it is because of its truth to
a matter profound and delicate and intensely
meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of
too much matter than too little; while his teaching,
far from being that of a facile "Epicureanism," is
seen, properly understood, to involve something
like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and
to result in a jealous asceticism of the senses
rather than in their indulgence. "Slight as was
the burden of positive moral obligation with which
he had entered Rome, " he writes of Marius, as on
his first evening in Rome the murmur comes to
him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from
the sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to
no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these,
that his Epicureanism had committed him."
Such warnings against mistmderstanding Pater is
careful to place, at^ so to say, all the cross-roads in
his books, so scrupulously concerned is he lest
any reader shotdd take the wrong turning. Few
writers, indeed, manifest so constant a consider-
ation for, and, in minor matters, such a sensitive

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On Re-Reading Walter Pater 259

courtesy towaxd, their readers, while in matters
of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual
pastoral responsibility. His well-known with-
drawal of the ''Conclusion" to The Renaissance
from its second edition, from a fear that "it might
possibly mislead some of those young men into
whose hands it might fall," is but one of many
examples of his solicitude; and surely such as
have gone astray after such painstaking guidance
have but their own natures to blame. As he
justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception of
metaphysical formulcB, all depends, as regards
their actual and tdterior result, on the pre-existent
qualities of that soil of human nature into which
they fall — the company they find already pre-
sent there, on their admission into the house of
thought."

That Pater's philosophy could ever have been
mistmderstood is not to be entertained with
patience by any one who has read him with even
ordinary attention; that it may have been mis-
applied, in spite of all his care, is, of course, pos-
sible; but if a writer is to be called to account for
all the misapplications, or distortions, of his
philosophy, writing may as well come to an end*/
Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic very
properly held in popular esteem recently gave it
as his opinion that the teaching of Walter Pater
was responsible for the tragic career of the author
of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Certainly that
remarkable man was an "epicurean" — ^but one,

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26o On Re-Reading Walter Fater

to quote Meredith, **whom Epicurus would have
scourged out of his garden"; and the statement
made by the critic in question that The Renaissance
is the book referred to in The Picture of Dorian
Gray as having had a sinister influence over its
hero is so easily disposed of by a reference to that
romance itself that it is hard to understand its
ever having been made. Here is the passage
describing the demoralizing book in question:

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had
sent him. ... It was the strangest book he had
ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite rai-
ment, and to the delicate sotmd of flutes, the sins of the
world were passing in dumb show before him. Things
that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made
real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed
were gradually revealed.

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one
character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study
of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying
to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions
and modes of thought that belonged to every century
except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself
the various moods through which the world-spirit had
ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those
renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as
much as those natural rebellions that wise men still
call sin. The style in which it was written was that
curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once,
full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions
and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the
work of some of the finest artists of the French school

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On Re-Reading Walter Pater 261

of DScadents, There were in it metaphors as monstrous
as orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses
was described in the terms of mystical philosophy.
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the mor-
bid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poison-
ous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to
ding about its pages and to trouble the brain. The
mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of
their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and
movements elaborately repeated, produced in the
mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter,
a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made
him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping
shadows. . . .

For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from
the memory of this book. Or perhaps it would be
more accurate to say that he never sought to free him-
self from it. He procured from Paris no less than five
large paper copies of the first edition, and had them
bound in different colours, so that they might suit his
various moods and the changing fancies of a nature
over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely
lost control.

The book thus characterized is obviously by a
French writer — I have good reason for thinking
that it was A Rebours by Huysmans — and how
any responsible reader can have imagined that
Walter Pater's The Renaissance answers to this
description passes all understanding. A critic
guilty of so patent a misstatement must either
never have read The Picture of Dorian Gray, or

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262 On Re-Reading Walter Pater

never have read The Renaissance. On the other
•hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be
found that Oscar Wilde was one of those "young
men** misled by Pater's book, for whose spiritual
safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous,
one can only remind 6neself again of the phrase
quoted above in regard to "that soil of human
nature " into which a writer casts his seed. If that
which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there
is evidently something wrong with the soil.

Let us briefly recall what this apparently so
"dangerous" philosophy of Pater's is, and we
cannot do better than examine . it in its most
concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted
passage from that once-suppressed "Conclusion"
to The Renaissance:

, Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself,
is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given
to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see
in them all that there is to be seen in them by the
finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from
point to point, and be present always at the focus
where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their
purest energy ? To bum always with this hard, gem-
like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
. . . While all melts under our feet, we may well
grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution
to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the
spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses,
strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or
work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

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On Re-Reading Walter Fater 263

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and
of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one de-
sperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have
time to make theories about the things we see and
touch. . . Well! we are all condamnSSy as Victor
Hugo says; we are all under sentence of death, but
with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tons
condamnes d mart avec des sursis indefinis: we have
an interval, and then our place knows us no more.
Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high
passions, the wisest, at least among **the children of
this world,*' in art and song. For our one chance
lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many
pulsations as possible into the given time. Great
passions may give us this quickened sense of life,
ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of
enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise,
which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it
is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a
quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wis-
dom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love
of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to
you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest
quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for
those moments' sake.

Now, if it be true that the application, or rather
the misapplication, of this philosophy led Oscar
Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the less true
that another application of it led Marius to some-
thing like Christian martyrdom, and Walter
Pater himself along an ever loftier and serener
path of spiritual vision.

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264 On Re-Reading Walter Pater

Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can
make of the counsel thus offered, with so priestly
a concern that the writer's exact meaning be
brought home to his reader, other than an inspira-
tion toward a noble employment of that myste-
rious opportunity we call life. For those of us,
perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance
of the leisure of an eternity for idleness or experi-
ment, this expansion and elevation of the doctrine
of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and
trivial moral in the Horatian maxim of carpe dienty
is one thrillingly charged with exhilaration and
sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge
to us to make the most indeed, but also to make
the best, of our little day. To make the most, and
to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret
or misapply Pater forget his constant insistence
on the second half of that precept. We are to get
''as many pulsations as possible into the given
time, " but we are to be very careful that our use
of those pulsations shall be the finest. Whether
or not it is '* simply for those moments* sake,"
our attempt must be to give **the highest quality, '*
remember, to those ''moments as they pass.''
And who can fail to remark the fastidious care
with which Pater selects various typical interests
which he deems most worthy of dignifying the
moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural
right, to have their part; but those interests on
which the accent of Pater's pleading most per-
suasively falls are not so much the "strange dyes,

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On Re-Reading Walter Fater 265

strange colours, and curious odours," but rather
"the face of one's friend, " ending his subtly musi-
cal sentence with a characteristic shock of simpli-
city, almost incongruity — or "some mood of
passion or insight or intellectual excitement,'' or
"any contribution to knowledge that seems by a
lifted hori25on to set the spirit free for a moment. "
There is surely a great gulf fixed between this
lofty preoccupation with great human emotions
and high spiritual and intellectual excitements,
and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow
we die," whether or not both counsels start out
from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our
mortal day. That realization may prompt certain
natures to unbridled sensuality. Doomed to
perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem
with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the
beast, a life apparently not without its satisfac-
tions. But it is as stupid as it is infamous to
pretend that such natures as these find any war-
rant for their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater.
They may, indeed, have found aesthetic pleasure in
the reading of his prose, but the truth of which
that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed
them by. For such it can hardly be claimed that
they have translated into action the aspiration of
this tenderly religious passage:

Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are
indeed but a shadow, even so we may well adorn and
beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls and
whatever our souls touch upon — these wonderful

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266 On Re-Reading Walter Pater

bodies, these material dwelling-places through which
the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment
we wear, our very pastimes, and the intercourse of
society.

Here in this passage from Marius we find, to
use Pater's own words once more, '*the spectacle
of one of the happiest temperaments coming, so
to speak, to an understanding with the most
depressing of theories/' That theory, of course,
was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things as
taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of
the world's practical application of the old Heracli-
tean formula, his influence depending on this,
'*that in him an abstract doctrine, originally
somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial
nature well fitted to transform it into a theory
of practice of considerable stimulative power
toward a fair life." Such, too, was Pater's
nature, and such his practical usefulness as what
one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith,
Emerson, Browning, and even Carlyle were
artists so far related to him and each other in that
each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at
all events, a courageous and even blithe working
theory of life and conduct, out of the imrelenting
facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather than
ecclesiastically smoothed over — the facts of death
and pain and struggle, and even the cruel mystery
that surrotmds with darkness and terror our mor-
tal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the
worst, and with each, after his own nature, the

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On Re-Reading Walter Fater 267

worst returned to laughter. The force of all these
men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of
philosophical conceptions, but, had they not
been artists and poets, their philosophical concep-
tions would have made but little way. And it is
time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his
''message" leave unduly in the backgrotmd, that
Pater was an artist of remarkable power and
fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which,
whatever their philosophical content, have for
our spirits the refreshment and edification which
all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because
it is beauty. Marius the Epicurean is a great and
wonderful book, not merely on accotmt of its
teaching, but because it is simply one of the
most beautiful books, perhaps the most beauti-
ful book, written in English. It is beautiful in
many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in the
uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which
is at once austere and sensuous, simple at once
and elaborate, scientifically exact and yet mysti-
cally suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary
marble, sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose
that has at once the qualities of painting and of
music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, yet mov-
ing to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and ex-
pressive with every delicate accent and cadence;
prose highly wrought, and yet singularly surpris-
ing one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies,
artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous
art. It is no longer necessary, as I hinted above,

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268 On Re-Reading Walter Fater

to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it
appeal to one or not, no critic worth attention any
longer disparages it as mere ornate and perfiuned
verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer
hiding the poverty of his thought beneath a
pretentious raiment of decorated expression. It is
understood to be the organic utterance of one with
a vision of the world all his own striving through
words, as he best can, to make that vision visible
to others as nearly as possible as he himself sees
it. Pater himself has expotmded his theory and
practice of prose, doubtless with a sid^-thought
of self-justification, in various places up and
down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay
on "Style,*' arid perhaps even more persuasively
in the chapter called ''Euphuism" in Marius.
In this last he thus goes to the root of the
matter:

That preoccupation of the dilettante with what might
seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the
purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in
their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions,
a certain vision or apprehension of things as really
being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus — intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty
was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax
or day, clothing the model within.

This striving to express the truth that is in
him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for
individual quality must be ranked with the prose

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On Re-Reading Walter Pater 269

of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to
make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very
fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by
virtue of its greater personal sincerity.

There is neither space here, nor need, to illus-
trate this opinion by quotation, though it may not
be amiss, the musical and decorative qualities of
Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon,
to remind the reader of the magical simplicities by
which it is no less frequently characterized. Some
of his quietest, simplest phrases have a wonderful
evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet
Antonines, *' for example; '* the thtmder which had
soimded all day among the hills"; "far into the
night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last
lingerers home"; "Flavian was no more. The
little marble chest with its dust and tears lay
cold among the faded flowers." What cotild be
simpler than these brief sentences, yet how pecu-
liarly suggestive they are; what immediate pictures
they make! And this magical simplicity is parti-
cularly successful in his descriptive passages,
notably of natural effects, effects caught with an
instinctively selected touch or two, an expressive
detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly
sketched, and yet how clearly realized in the
imagination, is the ancestral country-house of
Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that ex-
quisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous
villa" — "Two centuries of the play of the sea-
wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay

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270 On Re-Reading Walter Pater

along its inaccessible ledges and angles/* Take
again this picture:

The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few
minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest
early; though there was still a glow along the road
through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds were
still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old
temple.

And again this picture of a wayside inn:

The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike
the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and
sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the
polished three- wicked lucernx burning cleanly with
the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the
bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets..
The white wine of the place put before him, of the
true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of
delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving
edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.

Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few
purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on
the Mona Lisa, conceiving it as always thus heavy
with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him,
and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his
constant happiness in light and air and particularly
running water, '* green fields — or children's faces."
His lovely chapter on the temple of -^culapius
seems to be made entirely of morning light, bubbling
springs, and pure motmtain air; and the religiotig

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On Re-Seading Walter Pater 271

influence of these lustra! elements is his constant
theme. For him they have a natural sacramental
value, and it is through them and such other in-
fluences that Pater seeks for his hero the sancti-
fication of the senses and the evolution of the spirit.
In his preoccupation with them, and all things
lovely to the eye and to the intelligence, it is that
the secret lies of the singular purity of atmosphere
which pervades his Marius, an atmosphere which
might be termed the soul-beauty of the book, as
distinct from its, so to say, body-beauty as beauti-
ful prose.

Considering Marius as a story, a work of imagin-
ation, one finds the same evocative method used in
the telling of it, and in the portrayal of character,
as Pater employs in its descriptive passages.
Owing to certain violent, cinematographic methods
of story-telling and character-drawing to which we
have become accustomed, it is too often assumed
that stories cannot be told or characters drawn
in any other way. Actually, of course, as many
an old masterpiece admonishes us, there is no one
canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no
limit to the variety of method and manner a crea-
tive artist is at liberty to employ in his imaginative
treatment of human life. All one asks is that the
work should live, the characters and scenes appear
real to us, and the story be told. And Pater's
Marius entirely satisfies this demand for those to
whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone
appeal. It is a real story, no mere German

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272 On Se-SeadiniC Walter Pater

scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones of his
erudition; and the personages and the scenes do
actually live for us, as by some delicate magic of
hint and suggestion ; and, though at first they may
seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persist-
ing, and, as it were, growing more and more alive
in our memories. The figure of Marcus Aurelius,
for example, though so delicately sketched, is
a masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pic-
tures of Roman life, done with so little, seem to
me far more convincing than the like over-elabo-
rated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned
detail, of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinbiune's
famous praise of Gautier's Mademoiselle de
Maupin applies with far greater fitness to Pater's
masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be
described as

The golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty,

it is Marius the Epicurean.

It has been natural to dwell so long on this
"golden book," because Pater's various gifts are
concentrated in it, to make what is, of course, his
masterpiece; though some one or other of these
gifts is to be found employed with greater mastery
in other of his writings, notably that delicate
dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story
certain subtle states of mind and refinements erf
temperament which reaches its perfectiou in.

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On Re-Seadin|( Walter Fater 273

Imaginary Portraits , to which the later "Apollo in
Picardy *' and '' HiMwIytus Veiled " properly belong.
It is only necessary to recall the exquisitely austere
" Sebastian Van Storck *' and the strangely contrast-
ing Dionysiac " DenysL'Anxerrois" to justify one's
claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind,
with a singular and fascinating power of incarnat-
ing a philosophic formula, a formula no less dry
than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in
living, breathing types and persuasive tragic fables.
This genius for creative interpretation is the
soul and significance of all his criticism. It gives
their value to the studies of The Renaissance^
but perhaps its finest flower is to be found in the
later Greek Studies. To Flavian, Pater had said in
Marius, ''old mythology seemed as full of untried,
tmexpressed motives and interest as human life
itself, " and with what marvellous skill and evoca-
tive application of learning, he himself later de-
veloped sundry of those ''untried, tmexpressed
motives, " as in his studies of the myths of Diony-
sus — "The spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping
in a thousand vines" — and Demeter and Per-
sephone — "the peculiar creation of country people
of a high impressibility, dreaming over their work
in spring or autumn, half consciously toudied by a
sense of its sacredness, and a sort of mystery about
it" — ^no reader of Pater needs to be told. This
same creative interpretation gives a like value
to his studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this
gift, active throughout the ten volumes which
18

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274 On Se-Readin|( Walter Pater

constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself
to be of the company of the great humanists.

Along with all the other constituents of his
work, its sacerdotalism, its subtle reverie, its
sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal
austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent pre-
occupation with the haunted recesses of thought,
there go an endearing homeliness and simplicity,
a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a
something childlike. He has written of her,
''the presence that rose thus so strangely beside the
waters," to whom all experience had been **but
as the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has
written of **The Child in the House." Among all
'*the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious
odours, and work of the artist's hands, " one never
misses ''the face of one's friend"; and, in all its
wanderings, the soul never strays far from the
white temples of the gods and the soimd of run-
ning water.

It is by virtue of this combination of humanity,
edification, and aesthetic delight that Walter
Pater is unique among the great teachers and
artists of our time.

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XXIII

THE MYSTERY OF '* FIONA MACLEOD"'

IN the fascinating memoir of her husband, which
Mrs. William Sharp has written with so much
dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she
dwells with particular fondness of recollection on
the two years of their life at Phenice Croft, a
charming cottage they had taken in the summer
of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from
Horsham, the birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh
in my memory is a delightful visit I paid them
there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with
special significance a conversation I had with Mrs.
Sharp, as four of us walked out one evening after
dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the
glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly
lamps by the wayside, and the nightjar churring
its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the thickening
dusk.

"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to

* WiUiam Sharp (Fiona Macleod). A Memoir, compiled by
his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)

The Writings oj Fiona Macleod, Uniform edition. Arranged
by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)

275

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276 The Mystery of

have a surprise for his friends in a fuller and truer
expression of himself than his work had so far
attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs.
Sharp did not confide — ^more than to hint that
there were powers and qualities in her husband's
make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had,
at all events, been but little drawn upon.

Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the
future "Fiona Macleod," for it was at Rudgwick,
we learn, that that so long mysterious literary
entity sprang into imaginative being with Pharais.
Pharais was published in 1894, ^^d I remember
that early copies of it came simultaneously to my-
self and Grant Allen, with whom I was then stay-
ing, and how we were both somewhat intrigui
by a certain air of mystery which seemed to attach
to the little volume. We were both intimate
friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquain-
ted with Sharp's earlier poetry than Grant Allen,
and it was my detection in Pharais of one or two
subtly observed natural images, the use of which
had previously struck me in one of his Romantic
Ballads and Poems oj Phantasy, that brought to
my mind in a flash of understanding that Rudgwick
conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me
doubly certain that ''Fiona Macleod"and William
Sharp were one, if not the same. Conceiving no
reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that
my friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by
such fuller and finer expression of himself, I stated
my belief as to its authorship in a review I wrote

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••Fiona Macleod'* 277

for the London Star, My review brought me an
urgent telegram from Sharp, begging me, for
God's sake, to shut my mouth — or words to that
effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for
having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent
severe silence till now unbroken ; though I was often
hard driven by curious inquirers to preserve the
secret which my friend afterwards confided to me.
When I say ''confided to me,'* I must add that
in the many confidences William Sharp made to me
on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve of
fanciful mystification, and I am by no means
sure, even now, that I, or any of us — ^with the
possible exception of Mrs. Sharp — ^know the whole
truth about ''Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is
clear from Mrs. Sharp's interesting revelations of
her husband's temperament that "the whole
truth" could hardly be known even to William
Sharp himself; for, very evidently in "Fiona Mac-
leod" we have to deal not merely with a literary
mystification, but with a psychological mystery.
Here it is pertinent to quote the message written
to be delivered to certain of his friends after his
death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my
death. You will think I have wholly deceived you
about Fiona Macleod. But, in an intimate sense
this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain
details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery.
I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively
understand or may come to understand. 'The
rest is silence.* Farewell. William Sharp."

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278 The Mystery of

"It is only right, however, to add that I, and I
only, was the author — ^in the Hteral and literary
sense — of all written under the name of 'Fiona
Macleod.'"

"Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain."
Does "I cannot explain" mean "I must not
explain," or merely just what it says? I am
inclined to think it means both; but, if so, the
"must not" would refer to the purely personal
mystification on which, of course, none would
desire to intrude, and the "cannot" would refer
to that psychological mystery which we are at
liberty to investigate.

William Sharp's explanation to myself — as I
believe to others of his friends — ^was to the same
tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he
only had actually written the "Fiona Macleod"
fantasies and poems, but — ^yes! there was a real
" Fiona Macleod " as well. She was a beautiful
cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams,
and seldom visiting cities. Between her and him
there was a singular spiritual kinship, which by
some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic
collaboration, had resulted in the writings to which
he had given her name. They were hers as well as
his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went
so far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplat-
ing a visit to London, but that her visit was to be
kept a profound secret, and that he intended
introducing her to three of his friends and no more
— George Meredith, W. B. Yeats, and myself.

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"Fiona Macleod'* 279

Probably he made the same mock-confidence to
other friends, as a part of his general scheme of
mystification. On one occasion, when I was
sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the
framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood
on top of a revolving book-case, and said *'That is
Fiona! " I affected belief, but, rightly or wrongly,
it was my strong impression that the portrait thus
labelled was that of a well-known Irish lady promi-
nently identified with Home Rule politics, and I
smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs.
Sharp, whose remembrance of her husband goes
back to '*a merry, mischievous little boy in his
eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-
grey eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a
tweed kilt,'* tells us that this "love not only
of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification
also," was a marked characteristic of his nature — a
characteristic developed even in childhood by the
necessity he always felt of hiding away from his
companions that visionary side of his life which was
almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness
of which in late years he felt compelled to screen
under his pseudonym.

That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual
living and breathing '* Fiona Macleod" was, how-
ever, virtually true is confided by this significant
and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's bio-
graphy. Mrs. Sharp is speaking of a sojourn
together in Rome during the spring of 1891, in
which her husband had experienced an unusual

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28o TKe Mystery of

exaltation and exuberance of vital and creative
energy.

There, at last [she says], he had found the desired
incentive towards a true expression of himself, in the
stimulus and sympathetic understanding of the friend
to whom he dedicated the first of the books published
under his pseudonym. ThlJP^iendship began in Rome
and lasted throughout the ^remainder of his life.
And though this new phase of his work was at no time
the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics
have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebt-
edness to this friend, for — as he stated to me in a
letter of instructions, written before he went to Amer-
ica in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of
his death — he realized that it was ''to her I owe my de-
velopment as 'Fiona Macleod,' though in a sense of
course that began long before I knew her, and indeed
while I was still a child,'* and that, as he believed,
* 'without her there would have been no 'Fiona Mac-
leod.' " Because of her beauty, her strong sense of
life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions
and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as
a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic
days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked
new doors in his mind and put him "in touch with
ancestral memories" of his race. So, for a time, he
stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp,
to give play to the development of this new-found
expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had
been moving with all the ardour of his nature.

From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one natur-
ally turns to the dedication of Pharais to which she

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"Fiona Macleod*' 281

refers, finding a dedicatory letter to '*E. W. R."
dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters,
but containing these more personal passages:

Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me
by your pleasure in this inscription, you modestly
deprecate the dedication^ you of this study of alien
life — of that unfamiliar JBmd-life so alien in all ways
from the life of cities, and, let me add, from that
of the great mass of the nation to which, in the com-
munal sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-
Tdir of friendship there are resting-places where all
barriers of race, training, and circumstances fall away
in dust. At one of these places we met, a long while
ago, and fotmd that we loved the same things, and in
the same way."

The letter ends with this: ''There is another
PAras (Paradise) than that seen of Alastair of
Inn^dn:::^e Tir -Nan-Oig hof friend^iip. I'here-^
"'fiiwe both haveseen beautiful visions and^dreamed
dreams. Take, then, out of my heart, this book
of vision and dream. "

"Fiona Macleod, " then, would appear to be the
collective name given to a sort of collaborative
Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an
inspiring Muse with the initials E. W. R.; that
psychical "other self" of whose existence and
struggle for expression William Sharp had been
conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general
littirateur, as known to his friends and reading
public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to have

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282 The Mystery of

always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within
that comely and magnetic earthly tenement
of clay known as William Sharp, but whom Will-
iam Sharp had been powerless to free in words,
till, at the wand-like touch of E. W. R. — the
creative stimulus of a profound imaginative
friendship — a new power of expression had been
given to him — a power of expression strangely
missing from William Sharp's previous acknow-
ledged writings.

To speak faithfully, it was the comparative
mediocrity, and occasional even positive badness,
of the work done over his own name that formed
one of the sttunbling-blocks to the acceptance of
the theory that William Sharp could be "Fiona
Macleod. " Of course, his work had been that of
an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his
life of Heine being perhaps his most notable
achievement in prose; and his verse had not been
without intermittent flashes and felicities, sug-
gestive of smouldering poetic fires, particularly
in his Sosptri di Roma; but, for the most part, it
had lacked any personal force or savour, and was
entirely devoid of that magnetism with which Wil-
liam Sharp, the man, was so generously endowed.
In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a secret
source of distress to the inntunerable friends who
loved him with a deep attachment, to which the
many letters making one of the delightful feattu'es
of ]\Irs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In him-
self William Sharp was so prodigiously a person-

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••Fiona Macleod** 283

ality/ so conquering in the romantic flamboyance
of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the
charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured tem-
perament, so essentially a poet in all he felt and
did and said, that it was impossible patiently to
accept his writings as any fair expression of him-
self. He was, as we say, so much more than his
books — ^so immeasurably and delightfully more —
that, compared with himself, his books practically
amotmted to nothing; and one was inclined to say
of him in one's heart, as one does sometimes
say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures:
'*What a pity he troubles to write at all! Why
not be satisfied with being William Sharp? Why
spoil * William Sharp' by this inadequate and mis-
leading translation?"

The curious thing, too, was that the work he did
over his own name, after ** Fiona Macleod" had
escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful
individual utterance, showed no improvement in
quality, no marks of having spnmg from the same
mental womb where it had lain side by side with
so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily
understand that such work would naturally lack
spontaneity of impulse, having to be done, more or
less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency:
so long as '* Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret,
William Sharp must produce something to show
for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret,
which would, also, be all the better kept by William
Sharp continuing in his original mediocrity. Of

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284 The Mystery of

this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thtis writes with
much insight :

From then till the end of his life [she says] there
was a continual play of the two forces in him, or of the
two sides of his nature: of the intellectually observant,
reasoning mind — the actor, and of the intuitively
observant, spiritual mind — the dreamer, which differ-
entiated more and more one from the other, and
required different conditions, different environment,
different stimuli, until he seemed to be two person-
alities in one. It was a development which, as it pro-
ceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical
and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8
threatened him with a complete nervous collapse.
And there was for a time distinct opposition between
those two natures which made it extremely difficult
for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions
were equally imperative in their demands upon
him.

His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative
work which he knew grew out of his inner self; though
the exigencies of life, his dependence on his pen for
his livelihood, and, moreover, the keen active interest
• * William Sharp " took in all the movements of the day,
literary and political, at home and abroad, required of
him a great amount of applied study and work.

The strain must indeed have been enormous,
and one cannot but feel that much of it was a need-
less, even trival *' expense of spirit," and regret that,
when '* Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come
into her own, William Sharp should have con-

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••Fiona Macleod** 285

tinned to keep up the mystification, entailing as it
did such an elaborate machinery of concealment,
not the least taxing of which must have been the
necessity of keeping up ''Fiona Macleod's"
correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to
say, to have thrown William Sharp overboard, and
to have reserved the energies of a temperament
almost abnormally active, but physically delusive
and precarious, for the finer productiveness of
"Fiona Macleod." But William Sharp deemed
otherwise. He was wont to say, ''Should the
secret be found out, Fiona dies,*' and in a letter
to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier — she and her husband
being among the earliest confidants of his secret —
he makes this interesting statement: "I can write
out of my heart in a way I could not do as William
Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the
woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless
veiled in scrupulous anonymity. . . . This rapt
sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic ecstasy
and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme
verges of the common world, all this is so wrought
up with the romance of life that I could not bring
myself to expression by my outer self, insistent
and tyrannical as that need is. . . . My truest
self, the self who is below all other selves, and my
most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts,
emotions, and dreams, must find expression, yet I
cannot save in this hidden way. ..."

Later he wrote: ('Sometimes I am tempted to
believe I am half a woman, and so far saved as I

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286 The Mystery of

am by the hazard of chance from what a woman
can be made to suffer if one let the light of the
common day illuminate the avenues and vistas of
her heart. ... *

At one time, I thought that William Sharp's
assumption of a feminine pseudonym was a quite
legitimate device to steal a march on his critics,
and to win from them, thus disguised, that recogni-
tion which he must have been aware he had failed
to win in his own person. Indeed, it is doubtful
whether, if he had published the ** Fiona Macleod "
writings under his own name, they would have
received fair critical treatment. I am very sure
that they would not; for there is quite a consider-
able amount of so-called "criticism" which is
really foregone conclusion based on personal pre-
judice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to
admit (employing a homely image) that an old
dog does occasionally learn new tricks. Many
well-known writers have resorted to this device,
sometimes with considerable success. Since read-
ing Mrs. Sharp's biography, however, I conclude
that this motive had but little, if any, influence on
William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs.
Janvier must be takeyi as virtually sincere.

A certain histriomsm, which was one of his
charms, and is perhaps inseparable from imagin-
ative temperaments, doubtless had its share in his
consciousness of that '*dual nature'* of which we
hear so much, and which it is difficult soipe-
times to take with Sharp's ''Celtic" seriousness.

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"Fiona Macleod** 287

Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when,
having left London, precipitately, in response
to the call of the Isles, he wrote: '*The following
morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood
on the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean
steamer, and before long were landed on an island,
almost the nearest we could reach, that I loved so
well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The
* we ' who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in
his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is his other
self.*' Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle
of Arran: ''There is something of a strange excite-
ment in the knowledge that two people are here:
so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as
though Fiona were asleep in another room. I
catch myself listening for her step sometimes, for
the sudden opening of a door. It is imawaredly
that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what
she will do — ^particularly in The Mountain Lovers.
It seems passing strange to be here with her alone
at last. ..." I confess that this strikes me
disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a
"dual personality" — after all, consciousness of
dual personality is by no means uncommon, and
it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius
are largely feminine — but it is another to drama-
tize one's consciousness in this rather childish
fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of
pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel
that William Sharp was right in thinking that
the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the

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288 The Mystery of

moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems
unmistakably to have been endowed with what I
suppose one has to call "psychic" powers —
though the word has been "soiled with all ignoble
use" — and to be the possessor in a considerable
degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense
attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood.
Mrs. Sharp tells a curious story of his mood immedi-
ately preceding that flight to the Isles of which I
have been writing. He had been haimted the
night before by the sound of the sea. It seemed to
him that he heard it splashing in the night against
the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had
seemed that he had risen from his bed and looked
out of the window, and even in the following after-
noon, in his study, he could still hear the waves
dashing against the house. "A telegram had
come for him that morning, " writes Mrs. Sharp,
" and I took it to his study. I could get no answer.
I knocked, louder, then louder, — at last he opened
the door with a curiously dazed look in his face.
I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I could not hear
you for the sound of the waves ! * "

His last spcdcen words have an eerie suggestive-
ness in this connection. Writing of his death on
the I2th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says:
"About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec
Hood by his side, he suddenly leant forward with
shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of joyous
recognition, *0h, the beautiful "Green Life,"
again!' and the next moment sank back in

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•Tioaa Macleod" 289

my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is
well!'"

*'The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's
lips, and stood for him for that mysterious Jife of
elemental things to which he was almost uncannily
sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely
to merge himself, of which too his writings a^
"Fiona Macleod " prove him to have had *' invisible
keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism,
this kinship with the secret forces and subtle mood^
of nature, this responsiveness to her mystic
spiritual ** intimations, " that give to those writings
their peculiar significance and value. In the
external lore of nature William Sharp was excep-
tionally learned. Probably no writer in English,
with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant
Allen, was his equal here, and his knowledge
had been gained, as such knowledge can only be
gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous
boyhood of which he has thus written: '*From
fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every loch, fjord, and
inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from
Arran and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern
Hebrides, from the Rhinns of Galloway to the Ord
of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associ-
ated myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds,
gamekeepers, poachers, gypsies, wandering pipers,
and other musicians." For two months he had
''taken the heather" with, and had been "star-
brother" and "sun-brother" to, a tribe of gypsies,
and in later years he had wandered variously in
so

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290 The Mystery of "riona Macleod'*

many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty
of the world. Well might he write to Mrs. Jan-
vier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a
much abused word, a very romantic life in its inter-
nal as well as in its external aspects. " Few men
have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and from
such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in
the words of his friend Walter Pater, that "to bum
ever with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life, ** then indeed the life of
William Sharp was a nobly joyous success.

And to those who loved him it is a great happi-
ness to know that he was able to crown this ecstasy
of living with that victory of expression for which
his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind
him not only a lovely montunent of star-lit words,
but a spiritual legacy of perennial refreshment, a
fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and
hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are
The Writings of *' Fiona Macleod.''

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XXIV

FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION

THE voluntary abdication of power in its zenith
has always fascinated and "intrigued" the
imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed
to kings and other gifted persons holding on to
their sceptres with a desperate tenacity, even
through those waning years when younger men,
beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether
their previous might was not a fancy of their
fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever really
kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we
have to rely on a legend of past accomplishment to
preserve our reverence. Therefore, when a Sulla
or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their
thrones at the moment when their sway over us is
most assured and brilliant, we wonder — wonder at
a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of
romantic reserves of power which seal not only our
allegiance to them, but that of posterity. The
mystery which resides in all greatness, in all charm,
is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay.
They remain fortimate as those whom the gods
loved, wearing the aureoles of immortal promise.

291

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2g2 Forbes-Robertson t

Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets,
for example, very seldom. Thus we find the works
of most of them encimibered with the d6bris of
their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare
example of a poet who laid down his pen deliber-
ately, not merely as an artist in words, but as an
artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable
preface to the collected edition of his poems, com-
pleted that work which in his youth he had set
before him. His readers, therefore, are not
saddened by any pathetic gleanings from a once-
rich harvest-field, or the carefully picked-up shak-
ings of November boughs.

Forbes-Roberston is one of those artists who has
chosen to bid farewell to his art while he is still
indisputably its master. One or two other dis-
tinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and
a greater number have bade us those professional
"farewells" that remind one of that dream of
De Quincey in which he heard reverberated
'* Everlasting farewells! and again and yet again
reverberated — everlasting farewells ! " In Forbes-
Robertson's case, however, apart from our cour-
teous taking the word of his management, we
know that the news is sadly true. There is a
curious personal honour and sincerity breathing
through all his impersonations that make us feel,
so to say, that not only would we take the ghost's
word for a thousand pounds, but that between
him and his art is such an austere compact that he
would be incapable of humiliating it by any merQ

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A.n Appreciation 293

advertising devices; and beyond that, those who
have seen him play this time (1914) in New York
must have been aware that in the very texture of
all his performances was woven like a sigh the word
''farewell. " His very art, as I shall have later to
emphasize, is an art of farewell; but, apart from
that general quality, it seemed to me, though,
indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy,
that in these last New York performances, as in
the performances last spring in London, I heard
a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson
seemed to be saying good-by at once to his audi-
ence and to his art.

In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness
that must accompany such a step, one cannot but
think there will be a certain private whimsical
satisfaction for him in being able to go about the
world in after years with his great gift still his,
hidden away, but still his to use at any moment,
and to know not only that he has been, but still
is, as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet
of his time. Something like that, one may
imagine, must be the private fun of abdication.
Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us,
lays down one art only to take up another to
which he has long been devoted, and of his early
affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing
Beatrice in Rossetti's ''Dante's Dream" bears il-
lustrious and significant witness. As, one recalls
that he was the model for that figure one rea-
lizes that even then he was the yoimg lord

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294 Forbes-Robertson t

Hamlet, bom to be par excellence the actor of
sorrow and renunciation.

It is not my province to write here of Forbes-
Robertson from the point of view of the reminis-
cent playgoer or of the technical critic of acting.
Others, obviously, are far better qualified to
undertake those offices for his fame. I would
merely offer him the tribute of one to whom
for maiiy years his acting has been something more
than acting, as usually imderstood, something to
class with great poetry, and all the spiritual
exaltation which ''great poetry" impUes. From
first to last, however associated with that whim-
sical comedy of which, too, he is appropriately a
master, he has struck for me that note of almost
heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all
its superficial materialism and cynicism, is the key-
note of the modem world.

When I say ''first," I am thinking of the first
time I saw him, on the first night of The Profligate
by Pinero, in its day one of the plays that blazed
the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say,
sociological, drama since become even moffe
deadly in earnest, though perhaps less deadly in
skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga
Nethersole, then quite imknown, made a striking
impression of evil, though playing only a small
part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for me>
and I think for all the playgoing London of the
time, that gave the play its chief value by making
us startlingly aware, through the poignancy of his

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An Appreciation 295

personality, of what one might call the voice of the
modem conscience. To associate that thrillingly
beautiful and profound voice of his with anything
that sounds so prosaic as a ** modem conscience"
may seem unkind, but actually our modem con-
science is anything but prosaic, and combines
within it something at once poetic and prophetic,
of which that something ghostly in Forbes-
Robertson's acting is peculiarly expressive. That
quality of other-worldliness which at once scared
and fascinated the lodgers in The Passing of the
Third Floor Back is present in all Forbes-Robert-
son's acting. It was that which strangely stirred
us, that first night of The Profligate. We meet it
again with the blind Dick Heldar in The Light
That Failed, and of course we meet it supremely in
Hamlet, In fact, it is that quality which, chief
among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet
the classical Hamlet of his time.

Forbes-Robertson has of course played inniuner-
able parts. Years before The Profligate, he had
won distinction as the colleague of Irving and
^$ary Anderson. He may be said to have played
everything under the sun. His merely theatric
experience has thus enriched and equipped his
temperament with a superb technique. It would
probably be impossible for him to play any part
badly, and of the various successes he has made, to
which his present repertoire bears insufficient
witness, others, as I have said, can point out the
excellences. My concern here is with his art in its

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296 Forbes-Robrertsofi't

fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and
therefore it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon
any other of his impersonations than that of
Hamlet. When a man can play Hamlet so supreme-
ly, it may be taken for granted, I prestmie, that he
can play Mice and Men, or even that master-
piece of all masterpieces, Ccesar and Cleopatta.
I trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished
authors of these two plays to say that such plays
in a great actor's repertoire represent less his
versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boil-
ing necessity which hampers every art, and that of
the actor, perhaps, most of all.

To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-
Robertson's other parts is that they have "fed"
his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts
itiay be said to be studies for various sides of
Hamlet, his fine Romeo, for example, which, unfor-
ttmately, he no longer plays. In Hamlet all his
qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the
Stage that all an ambitious actor's experience is
only to fit him to play Hamlet is for once justified.
But, of course, the chief reason of that success is
that nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play
Hamlet. Temperament, personality, experience^
and training have so worked together that he
does not merely play, but is, Hamlet. Such, at
all events, is the complete illusion he is able to
produce.

Of course, one has heard from them of old time
that an actor's personality must have nothing to

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An Appreciation 297

do with the part he is playing; that he only is &n
actor who can most successfully play the exact op-
posite of himself. That is the academic theory of
''character-acting, " and of course the half-truth of
it is obvious. It represents the weariness induced
in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in
the stage phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet
it would go hard with some of our most delightful
comedians were it the whole truth about acting.
As a matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes
a niultiplicity of selves, so that he may play
many parts, yet always be playing himself. Be-
yond himself, no artist, whatever his art, has ever
gone.

What reduplication of personality is necessary
for the man who plays Hamlet need hardly be
said, what T^idde range of htmmnity and variety of
accomplishment ; for, as Anatole France has finely
said of Hamlet, ''He is a man, he is man, he is
the whole of man."

Time was when Hamlet was little more than
an opportunity for some robustious periwig-pated
fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the chance
to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display
of "new readings." For example, instead of
saying:

The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,

you diverted attention from your acting by
an appeal to the literary antiquarianism of your

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298 Forbes-Robertson t

audience, and, out of one or other of the quartos,
read the line:

The air bites shrewdly; is it very cold?

with the implication that there was a whole world
of suggestion in the difference.

One has known actors, far from imillustrious,
who staked their whole performance on some such
learned triviality or sonie trifling novelty of busi-
ness, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with
his mother, the prince comes to:

Look here upon this picture, and on this.

An actor who deserves better than he has
yet received in the tradition of the acted Hamlet —
I mean Wilson Barrett — ^used to make much of
taking a miniature of his father from his bosom
to point the contrast.

But all such things in the end are of no account.
New readings, new business, avail less and less.
Nor does painstaking archaeology of scenery or
dresses any longer throw dust in otir eyes. We are
for the play, the Uving soul of the play. Give us
that, and yotir properties may be no more elabo-
rate than those of a g uijn ol in the Champs-Elys6es.

Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative,
creating the scene about him as he plays, that
one almost resents any stage-settings for him at
all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully
painted.

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i\n Appreciation 299

His soul seems to do so much for us that we
almost wish it could be left to do it all, and he act
for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, with only
a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of
the stage saying, '*This is Elsinore."

One could hardly say more for one's sense of the
reality of Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally,
one is not tmaware that distressing experiments
have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan thea-
tre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in
need of all that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra
could do for them.

With a world overcrowded with treatises on the
theme, from, and before, Gervinus, with the
commentary of Wilhelm Meister in our minds, not
to speak of the starlit text ever there for our read-
ing, there is surely no need to traverse the char-
acter of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our
fathers — ^though he can never have meant so
much to them as he does to us of today — that he
is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to
our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the
most beautiful thing Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet
does for us is that it commands our love for a great
gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and
noblest with a sad smile and a gay himiour, in not
merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and tire-
some, but, also, a ghostly world.

When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as
two who knew him very well thought of him, —
Ophelia and Horatio,— and as one who saw him

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300 Forbea-Robert9pn t

only as he sat at last on his throne, dead, with the
crown of Denmark on his knees.
Ophelia's

CoTirtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword.
The expectancy and rose of the fair state;

the * ' sweet prin ce " of Horatio 's * * good-night ' ' — the
soldier for whose passage Fortinbras commanded

The soldier's music and the rites of war.

We think of him, too, as the haunted son of
a dear father murdered, a philosophic spectator
of the grotesque brutality of Ufe, suddenly by a
ghostly summons called on to take part in it; ^
prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad
humourist.

Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does
Forbes-Robertson..specially ^embody, I should say,
i^-4Ji^first place, his princeliness, his jg^ostliness,
tl^enrJri s c^mica l-ajid occasionally "ma^^
as where, at the end of the play-scene, he capers
behind the throne in a terrible boyish glee. No
actor that I have seen expresses so well that
scholarly irony of the Renaissance permeating the
whole play. His scene with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstem and the recorders is masterly: the
silken sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-
appeal as of lost ideals still pleading with the
vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its disillusion,
and behind, as always, the heartbreak — ^that side

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An Appreciation 301

of it which comes of the recognition of what it
i^ to be a gentleman in such a world.

In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson
makes it clear that that final tribute of Fortinbras
was fairly won.

The soldier — ^if necessary, the fighter — ^is there
as supple and strong as a Damascus blade. One
is always aware of the "something dangerous, " for
all his princely manners and scholarly ways.
One is never left in doubt as to how this Hamlet
will play the man. It is all too easy for him to
draw his sword and make an end of the whole
fantastic business. Because this philosophic swords-
man holds the sword, let no one think that he
knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness
— have a care! — ^is that of an imusually masculine
restraint.

In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's
tenderness was almost terrible. It came from
such a height of pity upon that little uncompre-
hending flower!

"I never gave you aught, " as Forbes-Robertson
said it, seemed to mean: "I gave you all — all that
you could not imderstand." '*Yet are not you
and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves
the arras. Is it your father?"

Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual inter-
pretation of Shakespeare goes pre-eminently, and
doubtless as a contributive part of it, his imagi-
native revitalization of the great old lines — lines
worn like a highway with the passage of the genera-

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302 Forbes-Robertson %

tions. As a friend of mine graphically phrased it,
"How he revives for us the splendour of the
text!''

The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase,
and how splendid the text is we, of course, all know
— know so well that we take it for granted, and so
fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forget-
ting what central fires of soul and intellect must
have gone to the creation of such a world of tran-
scendent words.

Yet how living the lines still are, though the
generations have almost quoted the life out of
them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in
our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift
to show.

It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as
it is, more than the superbly modulated voice : the
power comes of spiritual springs welling up beneath
the voice — springs fed from those infinite sources
which "lie beyond the reaches of our souls."

Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted,
how few actors — or readers of Shakespeare, or
members of any Shakespearian audience, for that
matter — ^have any personal conception of what it
means ! They may make a fine crescendo with it,
but that is all. They have never stood, shrinking
and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation,
upon the brink of that vastness along the margin
of which, it is evident, that Hamlet often wand-
ered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and
Horatio :

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An Appreciation 303

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

We are quite sure that they know nothing of what
they are sa5dng; and that, as a matter of fact, there
are few things for them in heaven or earth except
the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club,
and, generally, their genial mundane lives; and,
of course, one rather congratulates them on the
simplicity of their lives, congratulates them on
their ignorance of such haunted regions of the
mind. Yet, all the same, that simplicity seems
to disqualify them from playing Hamlet.

Pew Shakespearian actors seem to remember
what they are playing — Shakespeare. One would
think that to be held a worthy interpreter of so
great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so
golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar
Wilde, in a fine sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as

Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow,

and we may be siu-e that Irving appreciated the
honour thus paid him, he who so wonderfully
interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well
understood the irony of his intellect, even the
breadth of his humanity, yet in Hamlet, at all
events, so strangely missed his soul.

Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We
have watched them squirming through those
scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which
they had very evidently walked the hospitals in a
bvisinesslike quest of death-agonies, as certain

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304 Forbes-Robertaon t

histrionic connoisseurs of madness in Prance
lovingly haunt the Saltp6tri6re. J As I look back,
I wonder how we tolerated their wriggling absurd-
ity. I suppose it was that the hand of tradition
was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not
forget, the words were there, the immortal words,
and an atmosphere of tragic death and immortality
that only such words could create:

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To hear my story . . .

The rest is silence. . . .

How different it is when Porbes-Robertspn's
Hamlet dies ! All my life I seem to have been ask-
ing my friends, those I loved best, those who
valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and
the strongest in our strange human life, to come
with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in Hamlet.
I asked them because, as that strange yoimg dead
king sat upon his throne, there was something,
whatever it meant — death, life, immortality, what
you will — of a surpassing loveliness, something
transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial,
brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite
natiu-al that that stern Northern warrior, with
his winged helmet, should bend the knee, I
would not exchange anything I have ever read or
seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits th|re so still
and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.

Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shak^-

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An Appreciation 305

spearian actor; he is a great spiritual actor. The
one doubtless implies the other, though the impli-
cation has not always appeared to be obvious.

He is prophetic of what the stage will some
day be, and what we can see it here and there
preparing to becomcy^In all the welter of the dra- [
matic conditions of the moment there emerges i
one fact, that of the growing importance of the
stage as a vehicle for what one may term general
culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema,
is strangely, by how long and circuitous a route,
returning of course, with an immeasurably de-
veloped equipment, to its starting-point, ending
curiously where it began as the handmaid of the
church. As with the old moralities or miracle-
plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The
lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety
and delight, are relying more and more upon the
actor for their expression, and less on the accredited
doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers
are doing much for our souls. Our duties as
citizens are being taught us by well-advertised
plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or
change our police commissioner, we enforce our
desire by the object-lesson of a play. The great
new plays may not yet be here, but the public
once more is going to the theatre, as it went
long ago in Athens, to be delighted and amused,
of coursfli but also to be instructed in national
and civic affairs, and, most important of all, to be
purified by pity and terror.

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XXV

A MEMORY OF FR^D^RIC MISTRAL

THERE are many signs that poetry is coming
into its own again — even here in America,
which, while actually one of the most romantic
and sentimental of cotmtries, fondly imagines
itself the most prosaic.

Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his
clarion^tongued quickening of the British Empire,
shown so convincingly what dynamic force still
belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet
in general seems to be winning back some of that
serious respect from his fellow-citizens which,
imder a misapprehension of his effeminacy and
general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The
poet is not so much a joke to the multitude as he
was a few years ago, and the term '* minor poet"
seems to have fallen into desuetude.

Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-
Saxon blood, nowadays at all events, to make
a national hero of a poet, one might say a verit-
able king, such as Frederic Mistral is today
in Provence. In our time, Bjomson in Norway
was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he held

306

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A Memory of Fr6d6ric Mistral 307

his position as actual ''father of his people" for
very much the same reasons. At once a command-
ing and lovable personality, he and his work were
absolutely identified with his coimtry and his
coimtrymen. He was simply Norway incarnate.

So, today in Provence, it is with Fr6d6ric
Mistral. He is not only a poet of Provence. He
is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble
quality of his work, his position as the foremost
representative of his compatriots is romantically
unique. No other country today, pointing to its
greatest man, would point out — a poet; whereas
Mistral, were he not as imspoiled as he is laurelled,
might, with literal truth, say:

''Provence — c'est mot/''

We had hardly set foot in Provence this last
spring, my wife and I, before we realized, with
grateful wonder, that we had come to a country
that has a poet for a king.

On arriving at Md^rseilles almost the first word
we heard was ''Mistral" — ^not the bitter wind of
the same name, but the name of the honey- tongued
"Master." Our innkeeper — O the delightful
innkeepers of France! — on our consulting him as
to our project of a walking trip through the Midi —
as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence — said, for
his first aid to the traveller: " Then, of course, you
will see our great poet. Mistral. " And he prompt-
ly produced a copy of MirHo, which he begged me
to use till I had bought a copy for myself.

"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusi-

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3o8 A Memorx of Frederic Mistral

asm, using the words I have borrowed from his
lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!"

Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic
over Mistral and his fellows. And Mistral, in his
memoirs, gives an amusing account of a philo-
logical battle fought over the letter "s" in a room
behind one of the Marseilles bookshops between
"the amateurs of trivialities, the rhjmiers of the
white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the
young innovators of the "felibrige."

But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle
of those young enthusiasts has long since been won.
What that battle was and what an extraordinary
victory came of it must needs be told for the
significance of Mistral in Provence to be properly
understood.

The story is one of the most romantic in the
history of literature. Briefly, it is this:

The Provengal language, the "langue d'oc," was,
of course, once the courtly and lettered language of
Europe, the language of the great troubadoiars, and
through them the vehicle of the culture and refine-
ment of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
From it may be said to have sprung the beginnings
of Italian literature.

But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the
language of Northern France, the "langue d'oil,"
gradually took its place, and when Mistral was
bom, in 1830, Provengal had long been regarded
as little more than a patois.

Now it was the yoimg Mistral's dream, as a

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A Memory of Fredferic Mistral 309

scjiool-boy in the old convent school of Saint
Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his
native tongue to its former high estate, to make it
once more a literary language, and it chanced
that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was
secretly cherishing the same dream.

The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one
day, found that, instead of working at his prescribed
task, he was busily engaged in translating the
Penitential Psalms into Provencal. Instead of
pimishing him, the master gratefully hailed a
kindred spirit, and presently confided Provengal
verses of his own making. From that moment,
though there was a dozen years' difference between
their ages. Mistral and Roumanille began a friend-
ship which was to last till Roumanille's death, a
friendship of half a century.

Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and
presently seven friends, whose names are all
famous now, and most of whom have statues in
Aries or in Avignon — Roumanille, Mistral, Au-
banel, Mathieu, Gi6ra, Brimet, and Tavan — after
the manner of Ronsard's **P16iade," and Rossetti's
^' P. R. B. " — formed themselves into a brotherhood
to carry on the great work of regeneration.

They needed a name to call themselves by.
They had all met together to talk things over in the
old castle of Pont-Segugne, or, as Mistral more
picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven
that one blossoming Sunday, the twenty-first of
May, 1854, in the full springtide of life and of the

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31 o A Memory of Frederic Mistral

year, seven poets should come to meet together
in the castle of Font-Segugne. " Several sugges-
tions were made for a name for this brotherhood,
but presently Mistral announced that in an old
folk-story he had collected at his birthplace,
Maillane, he believed that he had fotmd the word
they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy
Christ is represented as discoursing in the temple
with "the seven felibres of the Law."

"Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic
young men as Mistral finished, and there on the
spot "felibre" was adopted as the password of
their order, Mistral coining the word "felibrige"
to represent the work they aimed to do, and also
their association. The name stuck, and has now
for many years been the banner-word for the
vigorous school of Provengal literature and the
allied arts of painting and sculpture which has
responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's
rallying cry.

But,' excellent as are the other poets which the
school has produced — and one need only glance
through a recent ArUhologie du Felibrige to
realize what a wealth of true poetry the word
"felibrige" now stands for — there can be no ques-
tion that its greatest asset still remains Mistral's
own work, as it was his first great poem, Mirhio^
which first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more
than inclined to be contemptuous, to the Provengal
renaissance.

Adolphe Diunas had been sent to Provence in

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A Memory of Frederic Mistral 311

the year 1856 by the Minister of Public Instruction
to collect the folk-songs of the people, and calling
on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with
his widowed mother at Maillane, he had found him
at work on Mir^io. Mistral read some passages
to him, with the result that the generous Dunias
returned to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent
of a new poet. Presently, Mistral accepted his
invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the
great Lamartine — who has left some charming
pages descriptive of his visit, — read some of Mirhio
to him, and was hailed by him as "the Homer of
Provence."

The press, however, had its little fling at
the new-comer. **The Mistral it appears," said
one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a
poem. We shall soon see whether it is anything
else but wind." Such Jias-. been -the invariable
welco m e of great men in a sm all world.

But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a
lion or a butt, and, after a few days' stay, we find
him once more quietly at home at Maillane. Yet
he had brought back with him one precious trophy
— the praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course
of a year or two (1859), Mirhio came to be pub-
lished at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, this
heart-felt dedication to Lamartine:

"To thee I dedicate Mir bio; it is my heart and
my soul; it is the flower of my years; it is a bunch
of grapes from Crau with all its leaves — a rustic's
oflEering."

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312 A Memory of Frederic Mistral

With the publication of MirHo Mistral instantly
"arrived, " instantly found himself on that throne
which, as year has followed year, has become more
securely his own. Since then he has written
much noble poetry, all embodying and vitalizing
the legendary lore of his native land, a land richer
in momentous history, perhaps, than any other
section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry
he has, single-handed, carried through the tremen-
dous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary of
the Provengal language — a Thesaurus of the Fili-
brige, for which work the Institute awarded him
a prize of ten thousand francs.

In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of
100,000 francs, but such is his devotion to his
fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize
for himself, but used it to found the Mus6e Ar-
16sien at Aries, a museum designed as a treasure
house of anything and everything pertaining to the
history and life of Provence — antiquities, fumittire,
costtunes, paintings, and so forth.

It was in Aries in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of
MirHo, that Mistral, then seventy-nine years old,
may be said to have reached the summit of his
romantic fame. A great festivM was held in his
honotu", in which the most distinguished men of
France took part. A dramatized version of his
MirHo was played in the old Roman amphi-
theatre, and a striking statue of him was imveiled
in the antique public square, the Place du Forum,
with the shade of Constantine looking on, one

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A Memory of Frederic Mistral 313

might feel, from his mouldering palace haurd

by.

In Aries Mistral is a well-known, beloved
figure, for it is his custom, every Saturday, to come
there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the
progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old
age. One wonders how it must seem to pass that
figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old square.
To few men is it given to pass by their own statues
in the street. Sang a very different poet —

They grind us to the dust with poverty,
And build us statues when we come to die.

But poor Villon had the misfortime to be a poet
of the **langue d'oil," and the Montfaucon gibbet
was the only monument of which he stood in daily
expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer
a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who
serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus
and the sister nymphs — as Virgil sang; and Vir-
gilian indeed has been the golden calm, and stmlit
fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than Homeric, is the
gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian
admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called *'the Homer of
Provence" — ^as Virgilian, too, seemed the land-
scape through which at length, one April afternoon,
we foimd ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of
him whose name had been on the lips of every inn-
keeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way from
Marseilles to Tarascon.

Yesi the same golden peace that lies like a charm

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314 A Memory of Frederic Mistral

across every page of his greatest poem lay across
that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of
cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate,
tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on
a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its
green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses,
or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and
there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with
the returning violet — here and there a farmhouse
(** mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly shel-
tered from the mistral by their screens of foliage —
and far aloft in the distance, floating like a silver
dream, the snow-white shoulder of Mont Ventoux
— the Fuji Yama of Provence.

At last the old, time-worn village came in sight —
it lies about ten miles north-east of Tartarin's
Tarascon — and we entered it, as was proper, with
the *' Master's" words on our lips: '*Maillane is
beautiful, well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows
more and more beautiful every day. Maillane is
the honour of the countryside, and takes its name
from the month of May.

" Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor con-
scripts! There is nothing to charm one there;
but Maillane has its equal nowhere — ^and one
would rather eat an apple in Maillane than a
partridge in Paris. "

It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were
full of young people in their Simday finery, the
girls wearing the pretty Arl6sien caps. At first
sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were pre-

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-A Memory of Frederic Mistral 315

pared to be amused, and saucy lads called out
things in mock English; but when it was under-
stood that we were seeking the house of the
"Master" we inspired immediate respect, and a
dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our
service and accompanied us in a body to where, at
the eastern edge of the village, there stands an
tmpretentious square stone house of no great
antiquity, surroxmded by a garden and half hidden
with trees.

We stood silently looking at the house for a few
minutes, trying to realize that there a great poet
had gone on living and working, in single-minded
devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty
years — there in that green, out-of-the-way comer
of the world. The idea of a life so rooted in con-
tentment, so continuously happy in the lifelong
prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and
so independent of change, is one not readily
grasped by the hurrying American mind.

Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed
into the garden. A paved walk led up to the
front door, but that had an unused look, and, gain-
ing no response there, we walked through a
shrubbery aroimd the side of the house, and as we
turned the corner came on what was evidently
the real entrance, facing a simny slope of garden
where hyacinths and violets told of the coming of
spring. Here we were greeted by some half a
dozen friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought
to the door a neat little, keen-eyed peasant woman,

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3i6 A Memory of Frederic Mistral

with an expression in her face that suggested that
she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master,
standing between him and an intrusive world.
As a matter of fact, as we afterward learned, that
is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having
been in the Mistral household for many years,
she has long since been as much a family friend as
a servant, and generally looks after the Master and
Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nurs-
ing and ** bossing" them by turns. **Elise" — I
think her name is — ^is a "character" almost as
well know in Provence as the Master himself.

So she looked sharply at us, while I produced
a letter to M. Mistral which had been given me by
a humble associate of the "felibres," a delight-
ful chansantder we had met at Les Baux. With
this she went indoors, presently to return with a
face of still cautious welcome, and invited us in
to a little square hall hung with photographs of
various distinguished friends of the poet and two
bronze medallions of himself, one representing him
with his favourite dog.

Then a door to the right opened, revealing a
typical scholar's study, lined with books from ceil-
ing to floor, books and papers on tables and chairs,
and framed photographs again on the free wall
space. The spring sunshine poured in through
long windows, and in this characteristic setting
stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his
distinguished head, with its sparse white locks, its
keen eyes, and strong yet delicate aquiline fea-

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A Memory of Froderic Mistral 317

tures, pointed white beard and mustache, sug-
gesting pictures of some military grand seigneur
of old time. His carriage had the same blending
of soldier and nobleman, and the stately kindliness
with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to
another day.

At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with
remarkable, dark, kind eyes, evidently many years
his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day one
of thc^e "queens of beauty" whom the ** felibres *'
elect every seven years at their floral ffetes. Mmfe.
Mistral was no less gracious to us than her hus-
band, and joined in the talk that followed with
much animation and charm.

We had a Httle feared that M. Mistral, as he
declines to write in anything but Provengal, might
carry his artistic creed into his conversation too.
To our relief, however, he spoke in the most
polished French — for you may know French very
well, but be quite imable to understand Provengal,
either printed or spoken. This had sometimes
made our journeying difficult, as we inquired our
way of peasants along the road.

It was natural to talk first to Mistral of liter-
atiM-e. We inquired whether he read much Eng-
lish. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of
one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and
Milton, for example, he had read little. Yed!
he had read one American author — ^Fenimore
Cooper. Le Feu-Follet had been a favourite book
of his boyhood. This we identified as The Fire-Fly.

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31 8 A Memory of Frederic Mistral

He seemed to wish to talk about America rather
than literature, and seemed immensely interested
in the fact that we were Americans, and he raised
his eyes, with an expression of French wonder-
ment, at the fact of our walking our way through
the country — as also at the length of the journey
from America. Evidently it seemed to him a
tremendous undertaking.

"You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful
people. You think nothing of going aroimd the
world."

We were surprised to find that he took the
keenest interest in American poUtics.

"It must be a terribly difficult coimtry to
govern, " he said. And then he asked us eagerly
for news of our "extraordinary President." We
suggested Mr. Wilson.

"Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordi-
nary man who was President before him. "

"Colonel Roosevelt?"

Yes, that was the man — s, most remarkable
man that! So Colonel Roosevelt may be interest-
ed to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an
enthusiastic Bull Mooser.

Of course, we talked too of the "f61ibrige,"
and it was beautiful to see how M. Mistral's face
softened at the mention of his friend Joseph Rouma-
nille, and with what generosity he attributed the
origin of the great movement to his dead friend.

"But you must by all means call on Mme.
Roumanille," said he, "when you go to Avignon,

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A Memory of Frederic Mistral 319

and say that I sent you'* — for Roumanille's widow
still lives, one of the most honoured muses of the
'*f6Ubrige."

When it was time for us to go on our way,
nothing would satisfy M. and Mme. Mistral but
that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made
by "Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we
raised the tiny glasses of the innocent liqueur
in our hands. Mistral drank '*A TAm^rique!"

Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in
the hall, and looking as though it was his statue
from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man
led us out into the road, and pointed us the way
to Avignon.

On the 30th of this coming September that
great old man — the memory of whose noble
presence and beautiful courtesy will remain
with us forever — will be eighty-three.

February, 1913.

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XXVI

IMPERISHABLE FICTION

THE longevity of trees is said to be in pro-
portion to the slowness of their growth. It
has to do no little as well with the depth and area
of their roots and the richness of the soil in which
they find themselves. When the sower went
forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which
soon sprang up as soon withered away. It was
the seed that was content to *' bring forth fruit
with patience" that finally won out and survived
the others.

These himible, old-fashioned illustrations occur
to me as I apply myself to the consideration of the
question provoked by the lightning over-produc-
tion of modem fiction and modem literature gener-
ally: the question of the flourishing longevity of
the fiction of the past as compared with the swift
oblivion which seems almost invariably to over-
take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the
present.

I read somewhere a ballade asking — ^where are
the "best sellers " of yesteryear? The ballad-maker
might well ask, and one might re-echo with Villon:

320

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ImperisKable Fiction 321

"Mother of God, ah! where axe they?** During
the last twenty years they have been as the sands
on the seashore for multitude, yet I think one
would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose
titles even are still on the lips of men — whereas
several quieter books published during that same
period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are
seen serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the
literary firmament.

What can be the reason? Can the decay of
these forgotten phenomena of modem fiction, so
lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the
offices of their own publishers, have anything to
do with the hectic rapidity of their growth, and
may there be some truth in the supposition that
the novels, and books generally, that live longest
are those that took the longest to write, or, at all
events imderwent the longest periods of gestation?/

Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most
successful manufacturers of best sellers was Guy
Boothby, whose Dr. Nikola is perhaps still remem-
bered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy
the fruits of his industrious dexterity. I bring
his case to mind as typical of the modem machine-
made methods.

I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writ-
ing" by phonograph, and chancing to meet him
somewhere, asked him about it. His response was
to invite me to come down to his charming country
house on the Thames and see how he did it.
Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without

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322 ImperisKable Fiction

'*side" or any illusions as to the quality of his
work. He loved good literature too well — ^Walter
Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his idols
— to dream that he could make it. Nor was the
making of literature by any means his first pre-
occupation, as he made clear, with winning frank-
ness, within a few moments of my arriving at his
home.

Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me
to some extensive kennels, where he showed me
with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took
me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in
his thoroughbreds; and again he led the way to a
vast hennery, populated with innumerable prize
fowls.

*' These are the things I care about," he said,
'*and I write the stuff for which it appears I have
a certain knack only because it enables me to buy
them!"

/Would that all writers of best sellers were as
/engagingly honest. No few of them, however,
/ write no better and affect the airs of genius into
\ the bargain.

Then Boothby took me into his "study," the
entire literary apparatus of which consisted of
three phonographs; and he explained that, when he
had dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of
them, he handed it over to his secretary in another
room, who set it going and transcribed what he had
spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceed-
ing to fill up another record. And he concluded

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Imperishable Fiction 323

airily by saying with a laugh that he had a novel
of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just
on the point of beginning it!

Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat
unusual in those days. Since then it has become
something like the rule. Not so much as regards
the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to
the breathless speed of production.

I am informed by an editor, associated with
magazines that use no less than a million and a
half words of fiction a month, that he has among
his contributors more than one writer on whom he
can rely to turn off a novel of 60,000 words in
six days, and that he can put his finger on twenty
novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of
a himdred thousand words in anywhere from
sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, too, the
case of a well-known novelist who has recently
contracted to supply a publisher with four novels
in one year, each novel to run to not less than a
hundred thousand words. One thinks of the
Scotsman with his "Where's your Willie Shake-
speare now?"

Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its
diminished head before such appalling fecimdity;
and what would Horace have to say to such frog-
like verbal spawning, with his famous *' labour of the
file" and his coxmsel to writers "to take a subject
equal to your powers, and consider long what
your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear. "
It is to be feared that "the montunent more endur-

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324 ImperisHable Fiction

ing than brass" is not erected with such rapidity.
The only brass associated with the modem best
seller is to be found in the advertisements; and,
indeed, ^1 that both purveyo r and con stu mer seem
to care about .may, wdl be summe d up in the p ub-
lisher's recommendation quotpri hy Vnnif^s^s^nr
Pheigs : *' This book £oes with a rush anc} ffl^'^ ^^'^^
a' s mas h A Such, one might add, is the beginning
and ending of all literary rockets.

Now let us recall some fiction that has been
in the world anywhere from, say, three hundred
years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive,
and, in many instances, to be classed still with the
best sellers.

Don Quixote f for example, was published in 1605,
but is still actively selling. Why? May it per-
haps be that it was some six years in the writing,
and that a great man, who was soldier as well as
\/ writer, charged it with the vitality of all his blood
and tears and laughter, all the hard-won human-
ity of years of manful living, those five years as a
slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison
once more at La Mancha), and all the stem struggle
of a storm-tossed life faced with heroic stead-
fastness and gaiety of heart?

Take another book which, if it is not read as
much as it used to be, and still deserves to be, is
certainly far from being forgotten — Gil Bias.
Published in 171 5 — that is, its first two parts — it
has now two centuries of popularity to its credit, and
is still as racy with humanity as ever; but, though

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ImperisKable Fiction 3^5

Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer,
over this one book which alone the world remem-
bers it is significant to note that he expended,
imusual time and pains. He was forty-seven
years old when the first two parts were published.
The third part was not published till 1724, and
eleven years more were to elapse before the issue
of the fourth and final part in 1735.

A still older book that is still one of the world's
best sellers, The Pilgrim's Progress^ can hardly be
conceived as being dashed off in sixty or ninety
days, and would hardly have endured so long hac^
not Bimyan put into it those twelve years of
soul torment in Bedford gaol. Robinson Crusoe
still sells its annual thousands, whereas others
of its author's books no less skilfully written are
practically forgotten, doubtless because Defoe,
fifty-eight years old at its publication, had con-
centrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime.
Though a boy's book to us, he clearly intended it
for an allegory of his own arduous, solitary life.

"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, '*do affirm
that the story, though allegorical, is also historical,
and that it is the beautiful representation of a life
of imexampled misfortime, and of a variety not to
be met with in this world. "

The Vicar 0} Wakefield, as we know, was no
hiuried piece of work. Indeed, Goldsmith went
about it in so leistirely a fashion as to leave \/
it neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson
rescued it, according to the proverbial anecdote;

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326 ImperisKable Fiction

and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in
no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years
.before giving it to the printer and to immor-
tality. It was certainly one of those fruits
"brought forth with patience" all round.

Tom Jones is another such slow-growing master-
piece. Written in the sad years immediately
following the death of his dearly loved wife,
/^Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says:
'* I here present you with the labours of some years
of my life *' ; and it need scarcely be added that the
book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, repre-
sented not merely the time expended on it, but all
the acciunulated experience of Fielding's very
human history.

Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's
coxmsel holds good of all imperishable literature.
Had he the asstirance to ask two himdred guineas
for a picture that only took a day to paint? No,
replied Whistler, he asked it for '*the training of
a lifetime"; and it is this training of a lifetime,
in addition to the actual time expended on com-
position, that constitutes the reserve force of all
great works of fiction, and is entirely lacking in
most modem novels, however superficially bril-
liant be their workmanship.

For this reason books like George Sorrow's
Lavengro and Romany Rye, failures on their pub-
lication, grow greater rather than less with the
passage of time. Thdr writers, out of the dieer
sincerity of their natures, furnished them, as by

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Imperishable Fiction 327

magj c, with a n inexhaustible provision of life-
giving '* ichor.'* To quote from Milton, "a good
TSoETs the precious life-blood of a master spirit,
embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life. "

Of this immortality principle in literature
Milton himself, it need hardly be said, is one of the
great exemplars. He was but thirty-two when he
first projected Paradise Losty and through all the
intervening years of hazardous political industry he
had kept the seed warm in his heart, its fruit only-
to be brought forth with tragic patience in those
seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the
scaffold which followed his fiftieth birthday.

The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme,
for the conditions of all great literature, whatever
its nature, are the same. Therefore, we may recall
Dai^te, whose Divine Comedy was with him from
his thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the
Mbitter-sweet companion of twenty years of exile.
I^Xjoethe, again, finished at eighty the Faust he had
conceived at twenty.

Spenser was at work on his Faerie Qtieene^
alongside his preoccupation with state business, for
nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years trans-
lating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that
Gray's Elegy owes much of its staying power to
^he Horatian deliberation with which Gray polished
and repolished it through eight yeiars.

If we are to believe Poe's Philosophy of Com-
positiofiy and there is, I think, more truth in it

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328 ImperisHable Fiction

than is generally allowed, the vitality of The Raven,
as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions,
is less due to inspiration than to the mathematical
painstaking of their composition.

But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is
most instructive for an age of '* get-rich-quick"
litterateurs. On his Georgics alone he worked
seven years, and, after working eleven years on
the Mneid, he was still so dissatisfied with it that
on his death-bed he besought his friends to bum it,
and on their refusal, commanded his servants to
bring the manuscript that he might bum it himself.
But, fortimately, Augustus had heard portions of
it, and the imperial v^to overpowered the poet's
infanticidal desire.

But, to return to the novelists, it may at first
sight seem that the great writer who, with the
Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modem era of
cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an excep-
tion to the classic formula of creation which we
are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson,
we have been told, used to despair as he thought
of Scott's ** immense fecundity of invention*'
and "careless, masterly ease."

'*I cannot compete with that," he says —
— '* what makes me sick is to think of Scott turning
out Guy Mannering in three weeks."

Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of
literary history, yet in his case, perhaps more than
in that of any other novelist, it must be remem-
bered that this speed had, in an unusual degree,

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ImperisKable Fiction 329

that '* training of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from
his earliest boyhood all Scott's faculties had been
consciously as well as imcoitsciously engaged in
absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing mem-
ory, preserving the vast materials on which he was
able thus carelessly to draw.

Moreover, those who have read his manly auto-
biography loiow that this speed was by no means
all "ease," as witness the almost tragic composi-
tion of The Bride of Lammermoor.Cli ever a
writer scorned delights and lived laborious days,
it was Walter Scott. /At the same time the condi-
tion of his fame in the present day bears out the
general truth of my contention, for there is little
doubt that he would be more widely read than he
is were it not for those too frequent longueurs and
inert paddings which resulted from his too hurried
workmanship.

Jane Austen is another example of comparatively
rapid creation, writing three of her best-known
novels. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility ,
and Norihanger Abbey between the ages of twenty-
one and twenty-three. Yet Pride and Prejudice,
which practically survives the others, took her ten
months to complete, and all her writings, it has
again to be said, had first been deeply and
intimately '* lived."

Charlotte Bronte was a year in writing Jane
Eyre, spurred on to new effort by the recent
rejection of The Professor; but to write such a book
in a year cannot be called over-hasty production

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330 ImperisHable Fiction

when one considers how much of Jane Eyre was
drawn from Charlotte Bronte's own life, and also
how she and her sisters had been experimenting
with literature from their earliest childhood.

Thackeray considered an allowance of two years
sufficient for the writing of a good novel, but that
seems little enough when one takes into account
the length of his best-known books, not to mention
the perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens,
for all the prodigious bulk of his output, was rather
a steady than a rapid writer. •** He considered,"
says Forster, "three of his not very large manu-
script pages a good, and four an excellent, day's
wo^k.'^y

Davtd Copperfield was about a year and nine
[^ months in the writing, having been begun in the
opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850.
Bleak House took a little longer, having been
begun in November, 1851, and completed in
August, 1853. Hard Times was a hasty piece of
work, written between the winter of 1853, and the
summer of 1854, and it cannot be considered one of
Dickens's notable successes.

George Meredith wrote four of his greatest
novels in seven years, Richard Feverel, Evan
Harrington, Sandra Belloni, and Rhoda Fleming
being produced between 1859 and 1866. His
poem. Modern Love, was also written during that
period.

George Eliot was a much-meditating, pains-
taking writer, though Adam Bede cost her little

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IxnperisKable friction 331

more than a year's work. Her novels, however,
as a rule, did not come forth without prayer and
fasting, and, in the course of their creation, she
used often to suffer from '* hopelessness and melan-
choly." Romolay to which she devoted long and
studious preparation, she was often on the point
of giving up, and in regard to it she gives expression
to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with the
contract for four novels a year, referred to in the
outset of this paper, is probably a stranger.

It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely
and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and
in that case I must give it up; for I will never write
anything to which my whole heart, mind, and con-
science don't consent; so that I may feel it was some-
thing — ^however small — which wanted to be done in
this world, and that I am just the organ for that
small bit of work.

Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist,
has to his credit in Westward Mo I one romance at
least which, in the old phrase, **the world will not
willingly let die, " was as conscientious in his work
as he was brilliant.

Says a friend who was with him while he was
writing Hypatia:

"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate.
We spent one whole day in searching the four folio
volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there,
and which was found there at last. "

The writer of perhaps the greatest historical

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332 IxnperisHable Fiction

novel in the English language, The Cloister and the
Hearth, was what one might call a glutton for
thoroughness. Qf himself Charles Reade has
said: '*I studied the great art of fiction closely
for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line.
I was a ripe critic before I became an artist."
His commonplace books, on the entries in which
and the indexing he was accustomed to spend
/one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the
notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in
cuttings from newspapers likely to be useful in
\/ novel-building, completely filled one of the rooms
in his house. In his will he left these open to the
inspection of literary students who cared to study
the methods which he had found so serviceable.

To name one or two more English novelists:
Thomas Hardy's novels would seem to have the
slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest
work. The Return of the Native, was on the stocks
^' for four years, though a year seems to have sufficed
for Far from the Madding Crowd.

The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverb-
ial, but this glimpse of his method is worth catch-
ing again.

The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D.
Lanier], Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to
Lloyd Osbourne. When all the colours were in hand
for the complete picture, he invariably penned it
himself, with exceeding care. ... If the first copy
did not pbase him, he patiently made a second or a
third draft. In his stern, self-imposed apprenticeship

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ImperisHable Fiction 333

of phrase-making he had prepared himself for these
|V workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting his
trial stories into dramas and then reworking them
into stories again.

Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one
might say, the devotional, spirit of the true artist
to all his work, but The Scarlet Letter was written
at a good pace when once started, though, as
usual, the germ had been in Hawthorne's mind for
many years. The story of its beginning is one of
the many touching anecdotes in that history of
authorship which Carlyle compared to the New-
gate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it witnesses that
an author occasionally meets with a good wife.

One wintry autimm day in Salem, Hawthorne
returned home earlier than usual from the custom-
house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: '*I am
turned out of office." To which she — God bless
her! — cheerily replied: '*Very well! now you can
write your book!" and immediately set about
lighting his study fire and generally making things
comfortable for his work.

The book was The Scarlet Letter, and was com-
pleted by the following February, Hawthorne, as , .
his wife said, writing '/immensely" on it day after ^
day, nine hours a day. / When finished, Hawthorne
seems to have been dispirited about the story, and
put it away in a drawer; but the good James T.
Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him
if he had anything for him to publish.

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334 ImperisKable Fiction

**Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would
risk publishing a book from me, the most un-
popular writer in America?"

** I would, " was Field's rejoinder, and after some
further sparring, Hawthorne owned up.

"As you have found me out," said he, "take
what I have written and tell me if it is good for
anything"; and Fields went away with the manu-
script of what is, without any question, America's
greatest novel.

Turning to the great novelists of France, with
one or two exceptions, they all bear out the
theory of longevity in literature which I have been
endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be
confessed that one of the most fascinatingly vital
of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of the excep-
tions, bom improvisator as he was; yet immense
research, it needs hardly be said, went to the
making of his enormous library of romance — even
though, it be allowed, that much of that work was
done for him by his "disciples. "

George Sand was another facile, all too facile,
writer. Here is a description of her method:

To write novels was to her only a process of nature.
She seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with
scarcely a plot and only the slightest acquaintance
with her characters, and until five in the evening,
while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself.
Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by
the novel had written itself in full and another was
unfolding.

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ImperisKable Fiction 335

Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist,
apart from her place as an historic personality, I
leave others to decide; but I am very sure that
she would be read a great deal more than she is if
she had not so confidently left her novels — ^to write
themselves. Different, indeed, was the method
of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal
task of The Human Comedy, sometimes working
eighteen hours a day, and never less than twelve,
and that "in the midst of protested bills, business
annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in
utter solitude and lack of all consolation." But
then Balzac was sustained by one of those great
dreams, without whose aid no lasting Uterature is
produced, the dream, '*by infinite patience and
courage, to compose for the France of the nine-
teenth century, that history of morals which the
old civilizations of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and
India have left tmtold."

To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period,
on a daily expenditure of '* three sous for bread,
two for milk, and three for firing. '* But doubtless
it had been different if his dream had been prize
puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a trans-
lation into the Four Htmdred.

Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean
artists, working, in Emerson's phrase, ** in a sa d
s incerit y, '' -^^rth^fht^ pafif>^ ce of an ant and thft
ener^^vo f^a volcan o. Of his Les MisSrables — ^per-
haps "Eliegreatest novel ever written, as it is, I
suppose, easily the longest — he said, '*it takes me

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33^ IfnperisHable Fiction

y nearly as long to publish a book as to write one";
and he was at work on Les MisSrables, off and on,
for nearly fifteen years. Of his writing Notre
Dame (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint
picture has been preserved. He had made vast
historical preparations for it, but ever there seemed
still more to make, till at length his publisher grew
impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last
made a start — ^after this fashion:

He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that
covered him from head to foot, he locked up all his
clothes lest he should be tempted to go out, and,
carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied him-
self to his labour just as if he had been in prison.
}/ He never left the table except for food and sleep,
and the sole recreation that he allowed himself
was an hour's chat after dinner with M. Pierre
Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and
to whom he would occasionally read over his day's
work.

Daudet, whose Tartarin bids fair to remain one
of the world's types, like Don Quixote or Mr.
Micawber, for all his natural Provengal gift of
improvisation and, indeed, from his self -recognized
necessity of keeping it in check, was another
strenuous artist. He wrote each manuscript
three times over, he told his biographer, and would
write it as many more if he could ; and his son, in
writing of him, has this truth to say of his, as of all
living work:

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IxnperisHable Fiction 337

The fact is that labottr does not begin at the
moment when the artist takes his pen. It begins in
sustained reflection and in the thought which ac-
cumulates images and sifts them, gamers and win-
nows them out, and compels life to keep control over
imagination, and imagination to expand and enlarge
life.

Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays,
but certainly, if Carlyle's **infinite_^C9^^acit^^
taking^,mins*' as a recipe for genius ever was put

"the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-
Macquart series. Talking of rewriting, Prosper
M6rim6e, best known for Carmen, is said tOt-
have rewritten his Colomba no less than sixteen
times; as our Anglo-Saxon Kipling, it used to be ^^
told, wrote his short stories seven times over.

But, of course, the classical example of the ar-^
tist-fanatic in modem times was Gustave Flaubert. L
His agonies in quest of the mot i>roi>re . the one and (
only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to (
have broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has C
told of him that " he would annotate three hundred
volumes for a page of facts. ... In twenty pages '
he sometimes saved three or four from destruc-
tion," and, in the course of twenty-six years'
polishing and pruning of The Temptation of Saint
Anthony, he reduced his original manuscript of
^o pages down to 136, even reducing it still further
after its first publication.

On Madame Bovary he worked six years, and in
writing Saldmmbo, which took him no less time, he

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33^ ImperisHable Fiction

studied the scenery on the spot and exhausted
the resources of the Imperial Library in his search
for documentary evidences.

Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion
for perfection to the point of mania, and it will be
a question with some whether, with all his pains, he
can be called a great novelist, after all. But that
he was a great stylist and a master in the art
of making terrible and beautiful bas-reliefs admits
of no doubt.

To be a great world-novelist you need an all-
embracing humanity as well, such as we find in
Tolstoy's War and Peace — ^but that great book,
need one say, came of no slipshod speed of impro-
visation. On the contrary, Tolstoy corrected and
recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted as
his amaiKtf©sis, is said to have copied the whole
enormous manuscript no less than seven times!

Yes ! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's
famous phrase, that

There are nine and sixty ways

Of inditing tribal lays,

And every blessed one of them is right,

I think that the whole nine and sixty of them
include somewhere in their method those sole
preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate
artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, what-
ever their nature, have usually been the longest
growing; and even those lasting things of literature

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ImperisHable Fiction 339

that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a
night, have been long in secret preparation in a soil
mysteriously enriched and refined by the hid
processes of time.

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XXVII

THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN

BULWER'S deservedly famous phrase, "The
pen is mightier thaii the sword, ** beneath its
surface application, if you think it over, has this
further suggestion to make to the believer in litera-
ture — that,, as the sword is of no value as a weapon
apart from the man that wields it, so, and no Igss
so, is it with tTie penl A mere pen, a mereswqrd —
of what use are tliey, save as mural decorations,
without a man behind them^

And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as
both great men are n ow drinking wine in Valhalla

out of the skullg qf t.hH^ rntipg, thpf^ ran bg no

haiTO in recalling.

Some yeafS ago I was on an unforgettable visit
to Bjomson, at his country home of Aulestad, near
Lillehammer. This is not the moment to relive
that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is
pertinent to my present purpose is a remark in
regard to Ibsen that Bjomson flashed out one day,
shaldng his great white mane with earnestness,
his noble face alight with the spirit of battle. We
had been talking of his possibly too successful

340

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THe Man BeHind tHe Pen 34^

attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen
camp in somehow incidentally.
^ Ibsen/' said he, " is not a m an. He is only a

There is no necessity to discuss the justice of
the dictum. Probably, if ever there was a man
behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood
concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas
Bjomson's employed other weapons also, such as
his gift of oratory, and was generally more dra-
matically in evidence. Bjomson and Ibsen, as we
know, did not agree on a number of things. Thus
Bjomson, like a human being, was unjust. But
his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It
was misapplied to Ibsen ; but, put in the form of a
question, I know of no better single test to apply
to writers, dead or alive, than —

** Is this a m an?| .Or is it only a pen?**
Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar ** So Long "
to Leaves of Grass:

Camerado, this is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.

And, of course, Walt was right about his own
book, whether you like the man behind Leaves
of Grass or not; but also that assertion of his
might be chalked as a sort of customs '*0. K."
on all literary baggage whatsoever that has passed
free into immortality. There is positively no
writer that has withstood the searching examin-

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342 The Man Behind the Pen

ation of time, on whose book that final stamp of
literary reality may not be placed. On every
classic, Time has scrawled ineflaceably:

This is no book;

Who touches this touches a man.

I raise the question of reality in literature in no
merely academic spirit. For those^who not^only
love books, but care for literature as a living^ thing,
the -question is a particularly live issue at the
present time, when not only the quantity of writing
is so enormous, but the average quality of it is jo
astonishingly good, when technique that would
almost humble the mastefs, and would certainly
dazzle them, is an accomplishment all but common-
place.\ At any rate, it is so usual as to create no
specialsurprise. If people write at all, it is taken
for granted, nowadays, that they write well.
And the number of people at the present time
writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little
short of appalling.

In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of
literature, there is less matter for congratulation
than would seem Ukely at first sight. There is,
indeed, no little bewilderment, and some dis-
quietude. Confronted, .with short s tories — ^a nd
novels also, for that matter — told with a skiH wh ich
makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy
amatQursfcoiiTrorited, too, with a thousand poets —
the number is scarcely an exaggeration — with

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THe Man BeKind tHe Pen 343

accomplishments pf. metre and style that ma ke
som e famo us^ singers seem like clodhoppers of the
muse, one is obliged to ask oneself:

TAr e these brilliant writers really greater than ^ .^

those that went before?^ I "^ /

It for some reason, felt at first rather than j / ' '
defined, we answer **no,'|we^are.fprced^^^
elusion that, after all, literature must be something
more than a mere matter of writings If so, we are
constrained to ask ourselves, what is it?

The men who deal with manuscripts — editors,
publishers' readers, and publishers, men not only
expert witnesses in regard to the printed literature
of the day, but also curiously learned in the story
of the book unborn, the vast mass of writing that
never arrives at print — are even more impressed
by what one might call the uncanny literary
brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled
by the lack of a certain something missing in work
which otherwise possesses every nameable quality
of literary excellence. One of these, an editor
with an eye as sympathetic as it is keen, told me
of an instance to the point, typical of a hundred
others.

He had been unusually struck by a story sent in
to him by an unknown writer. It was, he told me,
amazing from every purely literary point of view —
plot, characterization, colour, and economy of
language. It had so much that it seemed strange
that anything at all should be lacking. He sent
for the writer, and told him just what he thought.

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344 TKe Man Behind the Pen

"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor
seldom risks, ''th£is.,ifi gomp.thing the, maXter,.with
4t, after^U. , I wonder if you can tell me what it
Js." -- . .-

The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strange-
ly modest. All he could say, he answered, was
that he had done his best. The editor, agreeing
that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all
the more curious to find out how it was that a man
who could do so well had not been able to add to
his achievement the final *' something" that was
missing.

* * What, puzzles jneJI... said Jbhe editorjfinally,
**isjthat, with all the rest, you were JiQt.jaJble to
§jdkii:Juupajait3M Your story seems to havejieen
written bv a wonderful literary machine, i nstea d ^f
by_a man^'

And, no doubt, the young story- writer went
away sorrowful, in spite of the acceptance of his
story — whi£hj__aftfir all, was onlv lackin g in tha t
quality which^ you will find l^fOkin^ Jp a ll the
writing of the day, save in that by on e or two
exceptional writers, whp;, by their jsQlajticfli*-tll£

m ore forcib ly point, thp moral

A wonderful literary machine! The editor's
phrase very nearly hits off the situation. As we
have the linotype to set up the written words with
a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be
within measurable distance of a similar automaton
that will produce the literature to be set up without
the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In

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TKe Man BeKind tKe Pen 345

this connection I may perhaps be permitted to
quote a sentence or two from myself, written
d propos a certain chameleonesque writer whose
deservedly popular works are among the con-
temporary books that I most value:

A peculiar skill seems to have been developed
among writers during the last twenty years — that of
writing in the manner of some master, not merely with
mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power.
We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and
Milton that one can hardly differentiate them from
their masters; and yet — for this is my point — they are
no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing,
it would seem, some old mask of immortality through
which to express themselves. In a different way from
that of Guy de Maupassant they have chosen to
suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that,
whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to
eliminate, himself, their method is that of disguise.

In some respects they remind one of the hermit-
crab, who annexes some beautiful ready-made house,
instead of making one for himself. But then they
annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful conse-
quences for the reader, that not only is there no ground
for complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the
house does not really belong to them, and that they
are merely entertaining tenants on a short lease.

It is not that one is not grateful to writers
of this type. Indeed one is. They not only
provide us with genuine entertainment, but,
by the skill bom of their fine culture, they make

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34^ TKe Man Behind the Pen

us re-taste of the old masters in their brilliant
variations. One has no complaint against them.
Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble
to attach their own merely personal names to their
volumes, for, so far as those volumes are concerned,
there is no one to be found in them answering to
the name of the ostensible author.

Suppose, for example, that the author's name
on the title-page is ** Brown.'* Well, so far as we
can find out by reading, '* Brown" might just as
well be ** Green." In fact, there is no "Brown"
discoverable-^o individual man behind the pen
that wrote, not out of the fulness of the heart,
or the originality of the brain, from any experience
/or knowledge or temperament peculiar to ** Brown,"
but out of the fulness of what one might call a
creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of
a special talent for the combination of literary
influences. J

We have had a great deal of pleasure in the
reading, we have admired this and that, we may
even have been astonished, but I repeat — there is
no ** Brown." In private life '* Brown" may be
a forceful and fascinating personality, but, so far
as literature is concerned, he is merely a ** wonder-
ful literary machine." He has been able, by his
remarkable skill, to conjure every other writer into
his book — except himself. The name '* Brown"
on his title-page means nothing. He has not
**made his name."

The phrase ''to make a name" has become

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THe Man BeKind tKe Pen 347

so dulled with long usage that it is worth while to
pause and consider what a reality it stands for.
What it really means, of course, is that certain men
and women, by the personal force or quality of
their lives, have succeeded in charging their names
— ^names given them originally haphazard, as
names are given to all of us — with a permanent
significance as unmistakable as that belonging
to the commonest noun. The name ** Byron"
has a meaning as clear and unmistakable as the
word ''mutton." The words ''dog" and "cat"
have a meaning hardly more clearly defined
than the name "Bums" or "Voltaire." An
oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow
than Shakespeare can be confused with Spenser.
If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibiUty of
any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Brown-
ing."

The reason, of course, is that these names
are as unmistakably "made" as a Krupp gun
or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, ^fit^n^ ^^^^ ^""^
.passed into them, life lived as the m en who bore
those names eitlier chose, or were forced, to live it;
individual experience, stem or gentle, in combin-
^tion with an individual gift of expression.

All names that are really "made" are made in
the same way. You may make a name as Napo-
leon made his, through war, or you may make it as
Keats made his, by listening to the nightingale
and worshipping the moon. Or you m^y make it
as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old

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34^ The Man Behind the Pen

folios, whist, and roast pig. fA3X that is necessary —
granted, of course, the gift of literaojSSBl-fi^sion —
i s sincerity, an unshak abk faithfulness to yourself^
In j^ally . <gi:ea}L. wol£rs=^^r; at all e\reiitc ,^in
tVi^g^ja^ritmgs r^f their?! by which they immortally
exist — thece i^ not ono inoinoorg word. . The perish-
able parts of great writers willy-withotit exreption,
be found, to be thoseoyri tings which they attempted
either in insincere moments, Qi-atj jie instigation of
same surface talent-thatjiad no real connection
with their deep-dO-wn selves.
, A ll real writing has^pt to be lived beforg Jt is

/written — lived not only once^6r'twice,_but. lived
over and over again. Mere. reporting won't do i n

I literature, nor the records of easy voyaging
through perilous seas. Dante ha^^tojaaJkJttcough
h ejl be fore he^could ^litajol-it, and men tod ay
who^would write either of hell or.. q£. heaven will
never do it by a study of fashionable, jk^jying-
rooms, or prolonged sojourns in. ^h*^i ^^^^fitHT ^<^"^^
of the.^eatl

On the other hand, if you wish to write con-
vincingly about what we call ''society," those
lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real
in their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics,
it is of no use your trying, unless you were fortu-
nate enough to be bom among them, or have been
unfortunately associated with them all your life.
To write with reality about the most artificial
condition necessitates an intimate acquaintance
with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who

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THe Man Behind the Pen 349

would write about the depths and the heights
must have dared them, not merely as visitors, but
as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who
would w rite abo ut the plain, t he long^ low Is Ysls^ .
pf ^c omm onplace human life, , must have.. dwelt
in them, have possessed the dreary^ ..unlaurgllfid
coura^'"^f the good bourgeois, have kuowji
whatjt^ijjtaliye. out the day just for the dayis sake,
with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable .
and comfortable conclusion.

probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a
tremendously footed life is needed to make even
.one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the
process is but the same strangeness that accom-
panies the antecedent preparation of a flower.

How many suns it takes

To make one speedwell blue —

was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the
long sifting and kneading to which time subjects
the material of its perfect things.

One could not get a better example of what I
mean than Lovelace's song To Lucasta, Going to
the Wars, without which no anthology of English
verse could possibly be published. Why does
generation after generation say over and over, and
hand on to its children :

Yet this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much

Loved I not honour more.

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35^ The Man BeHizid tKe Pen

"^ Is it merely because it is..S Q well written, o r

-N, ^ Ijecause it embodies a hig hly moral sentiment sui t-

, ablejbo_the education of yor^^g ^^n M No, it is be-

r' "^ cause the sword and the pen for once met together

I in the hand of a man, because a soldier and a lover

^ I^ and a poet met together in a song. One might

^ K^ almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first

"^ with his sword, and merely copied it out with his

< pen. At all eventsQ ie was first a man and in cid-

en tally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang,

>,, ^ whether or not he wielded the weapons of physical

^^' " warfare, has been just the same. Otherwise he

V could not have been a poet.

When one speaks of the man behind the pen,
one does not necessarily mean that the writer must
* be a man of dominant personality, suggestive
in every sentence of " the ~sTf enuous life," and
muscle, and ** punch." /j Ater^t^rf^. m^ght |^g de-
i scribec[^as,iilS«.B^rMJn and as it tal^g s all

kinds of met; to make a world, so wit h the world o f
li terature. y ^All we ask is that we should be made
aware of some kind of a man. Numerous other-
qualities besides '*the pimch" go to the making
of living literature, though blood and brawn, not
to say brutality, have of late had it so much their
own way in the fashionable literature of the day —
written by muscular Uterary gentlemen who seem
to write rather with their fists than their pens —
that we are in danger of forgetting the reassuring
truth.
J. M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on

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TKe Man BeKind tKe Pen 351

Rudyard Kipling which has always stayed by me
as one of the most useful of critical touchstones.

'' Mr. Kipling, " said he, **has yet to leam that a
man may know more of life staying at home by his
mother's knee than swaggering in bad company
over three continents."

Nor is successful literature necessarily the
record of the successful temperament. Som e
writers, not a few, owe th eir significance to the fact
th at thev have found feum anjy intimate expression
for their own failure, or set down their weakness in
such a wav as to make themselves the consoling
companions of hu man frailty and disappointment
through the generations, j It is the paradox of
such natures that they should express themselves
in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may
be taken as the type of such writers. In confiding
to his Journal his hopeless inability for expressing
his high thought, he expressed what is infinitely
more valuable to us — himself.

Nor, again, does it follow that the man who
thus gets himself individualized in literature is the
Iqndof man we care about or approve of. (^ Often
it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it
iiad been just as well if some human types had not
been able so forcibly to project into literature
their imworthy and imdesirable selves. Yet this
^.Gad!s world,, and nothing human must be foreign
to _the philosophical student of it.

All the '* specimens " in a natural history museum
are not things of beauty or joy. So it is in the

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352 TKe Man BeKind tKe Pen

world of books. Prangois Villon cannot be called
an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he
immistakably belongs there, and it was to that
prince of scalawags that we owe not merely
that loveliest sigh in literature — '* Where are the
snows of yester-year?** — but so striking a picture
of the imderworld of medieval Paris that without
it we should hardly be able to know the times as
they were.

The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini — ^bully,
assassin, insufferable egoist, and so forth, as well
as artist. If he had not been sufficiently in love
with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his
amazing autobiography, how dim to our imagin-
ations, comparatively, would have been the world
of the Italian Renaissance!

Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a
personality even less agreeable still — ^morbid, dis-
eased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, immense
poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those
'* flowers of evil" which had as well been left in
their native shade. Yet, it is because he saw
them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in
his own strange comer of the world with such an
intensity of experience, that he is — ^Baudelaire.
Like him or not, his name is '*made/* A queer
kind of man, indeed, but not '* only a pen. "

Certain w riters have maj^^ cult of 'Umperson-
al^ty** in literature. They_ would do their utmost
to keep themselves out of sight, to let their subject-
matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is. an

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TKe Man BeKinci tHe Pen 353

impossibility. Theyjnight as well try to get out
of their ow n skins. The me re effort at suppression
ends ^in a form of revelation. Their mere choice
of themes and manner of presentation, let them
keep behind the scenes as assiduously as they may,
will in the end stamp them. However much a
man may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his
personaUty, compared with that of more subjective
writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet
when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his
reticence or his mask, we know that a man is
there — and that is all that concerns us.

On the other hand, of course, there are com-
panionable, sympathetic writers whose whole
stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm,
their personal way of looking at things. Of these,
Montaigne and Charles Lamb are among the great
examples. It matters to us little or nothing what
they are writing about; for their subjects, so far
as they are concerned, are only important in
relation to themselves, as revealing to us by
reflection two uncommonly '* human" human
beings, whom it is impossible to mistake for any
one else; just as we enjoy the society of some
whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing
him not so much for what he says, but for the way
he says it, and because it is he, and no one else,
that is talking.

. Again, there are other men whose names,
in addition to their personal suggestion, have
an impersonal significajice as marking new eras
23

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354 TKe Man BeHind tKe Pen

of human development, such as Erasmus or
Rousseau or Darwin ; men who embodied the time-
spirit at crucial moments of world change, men
who announced rather than created, the heralds of
epochs, men who first took the new roads along
which the rest of mankind were presently to travel,
men who felt or saw something new for the first
time, prophets of dawn while yet their fellows slept.

Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole
nation, like Robert . Bums or Cervantes; or a
great, half -legendary age of the world, like Homer;
or some permanent attitude of the human spirit,
like Plato.

No fixed star, gre at or small, in the firmament
of literattire~eveFIgot there wit hout some vi tal
reason,_or merely by writings how eyer^emarkable.
<^The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing
is seen to be the hollowest of misconceptions the
^^ moment you run over any list of enduring names.
Try any such that you can think of, and in every
case you will find that the name stands for some-
thing more than a writer. Of course, the man had
to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the
peculiarity was b ut the result of his individ ual
being, h is own special way of living his life o r
v iewing the world Ti

5,'^C

Take Horace,'^or example. Does he live
merely because of his unique style, his masterly
use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of
course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is
as alive today as he was when he satmtered

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The Man BeHind the Pen 355

through the streets of Rome, because he was so
absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the
world in all countries and times. He lived seriously
in the social world as he foimd it, and felt no
idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to
the heart's desire. He was satisfied with its
pleasures, and at one with its philosophy. Thus
he is as much at home in modem Paris or London
or New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is,
therefore, forever immortal as the man of the
world's Bible.

Take a name so different as that of Shelley.
We have but to speak it to define all it now stands
for. Though no one should read a line of Shelley's
any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into
the very life-blood of mankind. Wherever men
strive for freedom, or seek to attune their lives to
the strange spiritual music that breathes through
all things — ^music that none ever heard more
clearly than he — there is Shelley like the morning
star to guide them and inspire.

Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual
\^ thought of the modem world. In his own day he
was one of the most lonely and laughed at of poets,
moping among his lakes and moimtains and shep-
herds. Yet, as Matthew Arnold said, "we are all
Wordsworthians nowadays," and the religion of
nature that he found there for himself in his soli-
tude bids fair to be the final religion of the modem
world.

It is the same with every other great name one

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35^ THe Man Behind tKe Pen

can think of, be it Bimyan or Heine, Schopenhauer
or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast one's eyes
over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar
names, how literally the books that bear them
are living men, merely transmigrated from their
fleshly forms into the printed word. Shakespeare
and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding,
Sterne, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,
Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Poe — their very faces seem to look out at us from
the bindings, such vividly htmian beings were
they, with a vision of the world, or a definition of
character, so much their own and no one else's.
One might almost call them patented human
beings — patentees of spiritual discoveries, or of
aspects of humanity, whose patents can never
be infringed for all our cleverness.

Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism
that began to depreciate him because of the
glibness of his imitators:

All can grow the flower now, ^
For all have got the seed. J

And certainly, as I have already said, the art of

Vy ^ literary impersonation is carried to a pitch today

that almost amotmts to genius. Yet you have

only to compare the real flower with the imitation,

and you will soon understand the difference.

Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace
to say how much better we do the historical
novel nowadays than he did. At first sight,

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TKe Man Behind tKe Pen 357

we may seem to; in certain technical particulars,
no doubt we do; but read him again, read Rob
Roy or Quentin Durward again, and you will not be
quite so sure. You will realize what an immortal
difference there is, after all, between the pen
with a man behind it, and the most brilUant
literary machine.

Yes, ^thf^jp^l iiiff -p^ti^l^ ynen that write w ith
-gase! ' is once mor e with us, but no real book was
ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever
survived, or ever cari,~in which we do not feel the
presence of .the fighting, -4 re a ming ,. or merely
enjoying soul of a man.

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XXVIII

BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS

THERE are some people of great value and
importance in their own spheres, who, on the
strength of the distinction gained there, are apt
to intrude on other spheres of which they have no
knowledge, where in fact they are irrelevant, and
often indeed ridiculously out of place. This,
however, does not prevent their trying to assert an

«ority gained in their own sphere in those other
res where they simply do not belong; and such
e power of a name that is won for any one thing
that the multitude, unaccustomed to make dis-
tinctions, accepts them as authorities on the
lundred other things of which they know nothing.
*^ Thus, to take a crude example, the New York
fiPolice, which is, without doubt, learned in its own
^m)rld, and well-adapted and equipped for asserting
its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its
well-known bonhomie, into the worlds of drama
and sculpture, and, because it is an acknowledged
judge of crooks and grafters, presumes to be a
judge and censor also of new plays and nude
statues.

358

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Bulls in CKina-SKops 359

Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such
a character, absurd as a bull in a china-shop is
absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with the
china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage.

I take the New York Police merely, as I said,
as a crude example of, doubtless, well-meant, but
entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however,
it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if
more distinguished, bulls gaily crashing about on
higher planes.

Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime
Ministers or Presidents, deem themselves author-
ities on everything within the four winds, doctors
of divinity, and general arbitri elegantiarum.

Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature
was the late Mr. Gladstone. It is no disrespect
towards his great and estimable character to say,
that while, of course, he was technically a scholar —
"great Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase
for him — there were probably few men in England
so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author
to receive a post-card of commendation from Mr.
Gladstone meant at least the sale of an edition or
two, and a certain permanency in public appreci-
ation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria
was Mr. Gladstone's only rival as the literary
destiny of the time. To Mr. Gladstone we owe
Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe
Miss Marie Corelli.

John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for
his moral influence, and admire, or not admire.

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360 B\ills in CHina-SHops

him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop
when he made his famous criticism on Whistler,
and thus inadvertantly added to the gaiety of
nations by provoking that delightful trial, which,
farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely
evoked from Whistler himself some imperishable
dicta on art and the relation of critics to art, but
really did something towards the long-drawn
awakening of that mysterious somnolence called
the public consciousness on the strange mission
of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the
status of those ** eccentric" ministers of it called
artists.

I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops
are without their uses. John Ruskin is a shining
example to the contrary.

One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle,
for all his genius, was on one important subject —
that of poetry — as much of a bull in a china-shop
as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he
and Tennyson, the famous anecdote d propos of
Tennyson's publication of The Idylls of the King —
''all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to
do some work" — ^and many other such written
deliverances suffice to show how absolutely out of
court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician
may be on an art practised by writers at least as
valuable to English literature as himself, say
Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.
Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these
four gentlemen who, according to his standard.

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Bulls in CHina-Shops 361

never did any ''work*' have a strangely permanent
lcx)k about them compared with that of the
prophet- journalist of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.

A similar ''sage," another of the great conver-
sational brow-beaters of English literature,
Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business
to be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court
on the matter than Carlyle. In fact. Dr. Johnson
might with truth be described as the King Bull
of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There
was no subject, however remote from his know-
ledge or experience on which he would hesitate to
pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his
opinion. But in his case, there is one important
distinction to be made, a distinction that has
made him immortal.

He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop
with such quaintness, with such engaging sturdi-
ness of character, strangely displaying all the time
so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside
and encloses all china-shops, so tmparalleled a
genius of common sense, oddly linked with that
good old-time quality called "the fear of God,"
that in his case we felt that the china, after all,
didn't matter, but that Dr. Samuel Johnson,
"the great lexicographer," supremely did. His
opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry
in themselves amount to little — though they are
far from being without their shrewd insight — and
much of the china — such as Milton's poetry —
among which he gambolled, after the manner of

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362 Bulls in CHina-SHops

Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any
china he broke was all to the ultimate good of the
china-shop. Yet, if we accept him so, is it not
because he was such a wonderful bull in the chiifilj^
shop of the world? »/"*

There have been other such bulls but hardly
another so great, and with his name I will, for the
moment at least, put personalities aside, and refer
to droves rather than to individual bulls. A famil-
iar type of the bull in the china-shop is the modem
clergyman, who, apparently, insecure in his
status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual
sphere which so many confiding human beings
have given into his keeping, will be forever pushing
his way like an unwelcome, yet quite unauthori-
tative, policeman, into that turmoil of human
affairs— k)f which politics is a sort of summary —
where his opinion is not of the smallest value,
though, perforce, it is received with a certain
momentary respect — as though some beautiful
old lady should stroll up to a battery of artillery,
engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack,
and offer her advice as to the sighting and manage-
ment of the guns. The modem clergjmian's
interference in the working out of the secular
problems of modem life has no such picturesque
beauty — and it is even less effective.

One would have thought that to have the care of
men's souls would be enough. What a world of
suggestiveness there was in the old phrase ''a cure
of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much to-

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Bulls in CHina-SHops 363

day as ever. Perhaps they were never in greater
danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place for
the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place
for the clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those
various spiritual offices for which he is presumably
'* chosen." His vows do not call upon him either
to be a politician or a matin6e idol, nor is it his
business to sow doubt where he is paid for preach-
ing faith. If the^Qliurch is losing its influence, it
is largely because of its inefficient interference in
s egular a ffairs. anH because of the smaU percentage
of real spirituality amongst its clergy.

But thereTs a worse intrusion than that of clergy-
men into secular affairs. There is the intrusion of
the cheap atheist, the small materialistic thinker,
into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or
priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we
call the spiritual life, which, however undemon-
strable by physical tests, has been real to so many
men and women whose intellects can hardly be
called negligible, from Plato to Newman. I have '
too much respect for their coiu'ageous sincerity,
their nobility of character, as well as for the
necessary, if superficial, destructive work they did,
when to do such work meant no little personal
peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert
Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small
fry that resemble them merely in their imitative
negations; yet this is certainly true of both of
them that they were bulls in the china-shop to
this extent — that they confounded real religion

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3^4 Bxills in CKina-SKops

with the defective historical evidences of one reli-
gion, and the mythologic assertions and incongrui-
ties of its sacred book. They did splendid work
in their iconoclastic critidm of "the letter" that
"killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth Hfe"
they seem to have had but little inkling. To make
fim of Jonah and the whale, or "the Mistakes of
Moses, " had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it;
was no valid argiunent against the existence of
God, nor did it explain away the mysterious
religious sense in man — ^however, or wherever
expressed. Neither IngersoU nor Bradlaugh saw
that the crudest Mumbo- Jumbo idolatry of the
savage does really stand for some point of rap-
port between the seen and the imseen, aiidthat,
so long as Jbh&.- iiij ' Dtcriou& jxiutdncaj ot 111 ?* is
ackno wledged a pd r r v e r p noedi it m n tln ii liUl r
by' what symbols jyp AnVT^f^wlfyigfi jt^ and do it
reverence.' '^

^ ^ i ie m ay consider that the present age is an
age of spiritual eclipse, though that is not the
writer's opinion, and question with Matthew
Arnold:

What girl

Now reads in her bosom as dear

As Rebekah read, when she sate

At eve by the palm-shaded well?

Who guards in her breast

As deep, as pellucid a spring

Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

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Bulls in CHina-SHops 3^5

What bard,

At the height of his vision, can deem

Of God, of the world, of the sotil,

With a plainness as near,

As flashing as Moses felt

When he lay in the night by his flock

On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey

The beck of the Spirit like him.

Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than
the blindness of a hundred that cannot see. Some
people axe bom with spiritual antennae and some
without. There is much delicate wonder in the
universe that needs special organizations for its
apprehension. "One eye," you remember, that
of Browning's Sordello —

one eye

In all Verona cared for the soft sky.

In these imponderable and invisible matters,
many are in a like case with Hamlet's mother,
when she was unable to see the ghost of his father
which he so plainly saw. ** Yet all there is I see!"
exclaimed the queen — though she was quite
wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could see
nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-
comb throwing a paint-pot at a canvas and calling
it a picture!

Many people who have sharp enough eyes and
ears for their own worlds are absolutely blind and

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366 Bulls in CKina-SHops

deaf when introduced into other worlds for which
nature has not equipped them. But this by no
means prevents their pronouncing authoritative
opinions in those worlds, opinions which would be
amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many
literary people proclaim their indifference to and
even contempt for music — as if their announcement
meant anything more than their music deafness,
their unfortunate exclusion from a- great art.
Mark Twain used to advertise his preference for
the pianola over the piano — as if that proved
anything against the pla3ring of Pjaderewski.
Similarly, Tie acted the bull in the china-shop in
regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the
accepted creed of millions of men and women
of intelligence and social value without deserv-
ing even in a critic the approach of some
respect.
'% But humorists are privileged persons. That,

// no doubt, accounts for the astonishing toleration
of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a far-
J r J ceur, bom to write knock-about comedies — his^

/ plays, by th e way, might be t er med knock-abou t
J comedies of the middle-class^^ mind — he would
( never have got a hearing for his common-place
blasphemies, and cheap intellectual antics. He
/ is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help laugh-
(^ ing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for
)our laughter; for to him there is nothing sacred —
>exc^pi; hl§ press-notices'*an3^^Tiis royaltigs.

His so-called '^^'pEiTosophy" has all &irof danger-
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B\ills in CHina-SHops 367

ous novelty only to those innocent middle-classes\
horp ht^t yesterday^ '\o w hom any form of thought
js^novelty. ^Methusaleh hiniselt-wfts^rtot older
tlia,H''']SJfr.'^haw's ' * original ideas, ' '. In England,
twenty years ago/ we were long since weary of
his^egotistic Suffooneries. O f anything ' * fine *' in
literature or art he is contemptuously ignorant,

~~"£ia~fiSririm3%stan Of the finer shades

of human: life^- Of- ^ the-mea»ing..Qf ^uch words as
'^honour, '\';; gentleman,,'' ;; beauty, '' /; religion, "
he is by nature utterly shut out. He laughs and
sneers to ma ke up for his deficiencies, like that
Pietro._ Aretino who TErew"^ig ^ peri sfaafale-rmtd- -at

. Michael Angelo. Saia-it.-always. with Ihe vul-
garian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk
vulgarly oF"G631tQ a'.gTQQ.t man who' believed in
Qod— Count Tolstoi.

He "had written to Tolstoi & propos his insigni-
ficant little play The Showing up of Blanco Posnet,
and in the course of his letter had said: ''Suppose
the world were only one of God's jokes, would you
work any less to make it a good joke instead of a
bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been favourably
inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and
biographer Mr. Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-
jack sacrilege was too much for the great old man,
who seemed to know God with almost Matthew
Arnold's

plainness as near

As flashing as Moses felt,

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368 B\ill8 in China-Shops

and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke
which would have abashed any one but the man
to whom it was sent.

Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman — ^he "argued .
/ not concerning God. '^ It is a point of view which/
people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any
more than he or his *like can comprehend that
there are areas of human feeling over which for
him and other such bulls in china-shops should
be posted the delicate Americanism — keep out.

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XXIX

THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY

ONCE, in my old book-hunting days, I picked
up, on the Quai Voltaire, a copy of the
Proverbs of King Solomon. Then it was more
possible than today to make finds in that quaint
open-air library which, still more than any library
housed within governmental or diplomaed walls,
is haunted by the spirit of those passionate,
dream-led scholars that made the Renaissance,
and crowded to those lectures filled with that
dangerous new charm which always belongs to the
poetic presentation of new knowledge — those
lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being
given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young
priest named Abelard.

My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no
particular bibliographical value, but it was one of
those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos ''black with
tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung,
books that, one imagines, must have once made
even the Latin Grammar attractive. The text was
the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surroimded by
meadows of marginal comments of the Fathers
84 369

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370 The Bible and the B\itterflx \

translated into French, — the whole presided over,
for the edification of the young novice, to whom
my copy evidently belonged, by a distinguished
Monseigneur who, in French of the time of Bossuet,
told exactly how these young minds should imder-
stand the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a
magisterial style which suggested that Solomon
lived long ago — and, yet, was one of the pillars
of the church. But what particularly interested
me about the book, however, as I turned over its
yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between
them, a thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur
would surely have regarded as curiously alien to
their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of
a paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it
had once been in its sunlit life — a, flower, I thought
at first, but, on looking closer, I saw it was, or had
once been, a yellow butterfly.

What young priest was it, I wondered, that
had thus, with a breaking heart, crushed the joy
of life between these pages! On what spring
morning had this silent little messenger hovered
a while over the high garden-walls of St. Sulpice,
flitting and fluttering, and at last darted and
alighted on the page of this old book, at that
moment held in the hands of a young priest
walking to and fro amid the tall whispering trees —
delivering at last to him on the two small painted
pages of its wings a message he must not read. . . .

The temptation was severe, for spring was
calling all over Paris, and the words of anot|ier

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The Bible and tKe D\itterfl>^ 37i

book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in
his hand said to him in the Latin that came easily
to all manner of men in those days: Lol the winter
is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear
on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. . . .
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. ^^

The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying
that to him as it poised on the page, and, as his
eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, like
a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail,
half -frightened hold, while, high up, over the walls
of the garden the poplars were discreetly swaying
to the southern wind, and/he lilac-bushes Were
carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance,
as altar-boys swing their censers in the hushed
chancel, — but ah! so different an incense^

The flowers appear on the earth, he repeated to
himself, beguiled for a moment, the flowers appear
on the earth; and the time of the singing of birds is
come. . . .

But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny
yellow butterfly there came to him other stem
everlasting words: ^

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the
word of our Lord endureth forever.

Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old
book, that my young novice of St. Sulpice crushed
the joy of life, in the frail form of its little messenger,
between the pages of the book he held in his hand
just then, the book I held in my hand for a while

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372 The Bible and the Butterfl>^

a hundred and fifty years or so after — the book
I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire —
guarding that little dead butterfly even more than
the wisdom of Solomon. I wonder if, as he
crushed that butterfly, he said to himself — ^in
words that have grown commonplace since his
time — ^the words of that strange emperor Hadrian
— Animulay vagula, blandulal

Perhaps I should not have remembered that
book-hunting morning in Old Paris on the Quai
Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy
of the Proverbs of Solomon — ^with the butterfly
so strangely crushed between its pages — ^had it not
been for a circumstance that happened to me,
the other day, in the subway, which seemed to me
of the natiu-e of a marvel. Many weary men and
women were travelling — ^in an enforced, yet in some
way htunorously understanding, society — from
Brooklyn Bridge to the Bronx. I got in at Wall
Street. The '* crush-hour" was near, for it was
4:25 — still, as yet, there were time and space
granted us to observe our neighbours. In the par-
ticular car in which I was sitting, there was room
still left to look about and admire the courage of
your fellow-passengers. Weary men going home —
many of them having used them all day long —
have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men
in my car sat silently and sadly, contemplating
the future. As I looked at them, it seemed to me
that they were thinking over the day's work they
had done, and the innumerable days' work they

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The Bible and the Butterfl>^ 373

had still to do. No one smiled. No one observed
the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat
here and there, but no one gave any attention to
any business but his own thoughts and his own
sad station.

It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied
almost entirely by men-passengers, and, so far as
I could see, there were no evidences that men knew
women from men, or vice versa, yet, at last, there
seemed to dawn on four men sitting in a row that
there was a wonderful creature reading a book on
the other side of the aisle — a lovely young woman,
with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the
rainbow, that enchantment in her calm pearl-like
face, and in the woven stillness of her hair, that has
in. all times and countries made men throw up
sails and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown
Fates. The beauty, too, that nature had given
her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of
the rarest art. All imconscious of the admiration
surrounding her, she sat in that subway car, like a
lonely butterfly, strangely there in her incongruous
surrotmdings, for a mysterious moment, — to
vanish as swiftly as she had come — ^and, as she
stepped from the car, leaving it dark and dazzled —

bright with her past presence yet —

I, who had fortimately, and fearfully, sat by her
side was aware that the book she had been reading
was lying forgotten on the seat. It was mine by

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374 TKe Bible and tKe Butterfly

rightof accident,— treasure-trove. Sol picked it up,
braving the glares of the four sad men facing me.

^fatu^ally, I had wondered what book it was; but
its being botmd in tooled and jewelled morocco,
evidently by one of the great bookbinders of
Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess.

I leave to the imagination of lovers of books
what book one would naturally expect to find in
hands so fair. Perhaps Ronsard — or some other
poet from the Rose-Garden of old Prance. No!
it was a charmingly printed copy of The New
Testament.

The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a
few moments, and then I began to turn over the
pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared
after the manner of beautiful women in all ages.
A pencil here and there had marked certain pass-
ages. Come unto tney ran one of the underlined
passages, all ye that are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest, — and I thought how strange it was
that she whose face was so calm and still should
have needed to mark that. And another marked
passage I noted — He was in the world, and the
world was made by Him, and the world knew Him
not. Then I put down the book with a feeling
of awe — such as the Bible had never brought to
me before, though I had been accustomed to it
from my boyhood, and I said to myself: ''How
very strange! '' And I meant how strange it was
to find this wonderful old book in the hands of
this wonderful yoimg beauty.

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The Bible and the Butterfly 375

It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in
that old copy of the Proverbs of King Solomon,
but how much stranger to find the New Testament
in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings,
of an Amaican butterfly.

I foimd something written in the book at least
as wonderful to me as the sacred text. It was the
name of the butterfly — ^a name almost as beautiful
as herself. So I was enabled to return her book
to her. There is, of course, no need to mention
a name as well-known for good works as good
looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name
of the most beautiful actress in the world.

There is a moral to this story. Morals — to
stories — ^are once more coming into fashion. The
Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such
associations as I have recalled. There were no
butterflies between its pages, nor was it presented
to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a very
grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed
to one's childish ignorance, for the purpose which
that yoimg priest of St. Sulpice had used the
pages of his copy of the Proverbs of King Solomon^
that of crushing out the joy of life.

My first acquaintance with it as I remember,
was in a Methodist chapel in Staffordshire, Eng-
land, where three small boys, including myself,
prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were
endeavouring to relieve the apparently endless
ennui of the service by eating surreptitious apples.
Suddenly upon our three young heads descended

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376 The Bible and the Dutterflx

what seemed like a heavy block of wood, wielded
by an ancient deacon who did not approve of boys.
We were, each of us, no more than eight years old,
and the book which had thus descended upon our
heads was nothing more to us than a very weighty
book — to be dodged if possible, for we were still in
that happy time of life when we hated all books.
We knew nothing of its contents^-to us it was only
a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into silence and
good behaviour.

So the Bible has been for many generations of
boys a book even more terrible than Caesar's
Commentaries or the Mneid of Virgil — ^the dull
thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shotdders of
youth which you bore as courageously as you
could.

So many of us grew up with what one might
call a natural prejudice against the Bible.

Then some of us who cared for literature took
it up casually and fotmd its poetic beauty. We
read the Book of Job — ^which, by the way, Mr.
Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as
we read it even the stars themselves seemed less
wonderfid than this description of their marvel
and mystery;

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades
or loose the hands of Orion?

Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season?
or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?

Or we read in the 37th chapter of the Book of
Ezekiel of that weird valley that was full of bones —

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THe Bible and tHe Butterfly 377

'*and as I prophesied^ there was a noise, and behold
a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone,'*
surely one of the most wonderful visions of the
imagination in all literature.

Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric
of Jeremiah and Isaiah, or the music of the me-
lodious heart-strings of King David ; we read the
solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to
remember our Creator in the days of our youth,
with its haunting picture of old age: and the
loveliness of The Song of Songs passed into our lives
forever.

To this purely literary love of the Bible there has
been added within the last few years a certain
renewed regard for it as the profoundest book of
the soul, and for some minds not conventionally
religious it has regained even some of its old
authority as a spiritual guide and stay. And I will '
confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep
at night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has
written anything to equal the Twenty-third
Psalm.

THE END

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